Last week, the Tomb Raider remastering team at Aspyr delivered an unannounced, surprise port of another Tomb Raider game: the 2013 series reboot in its Definitive Edition guise, now running on both Switch and Switch 2 consoles. Unfortunately, it's a remarkably iffy port, with Switch 2 in particular proving a disappointment on a visual basis, and it pales compared to the team's winning efforts to revive the original trilogy.

In a world where developers are delivering Switch 2 ports comparable (and better in some regards) than Series S titles, it's disappointing to see this game paring back so many of the game's features that even the original non-Definitive PlayStation 3 has visual effects that this new version does not. The differences are especially stark because they revolve around the mood-establishing shadows and foliage that anchored the 12-year-old original.

Kicking off with the Switch 2 version stacked up against broadly comparable PS4 hardware, shadow resolution has dropped while foliage-based shadows have either been removed or converted from swaying, branch-tracked shadows to static ones. Ambient occlusion has been pared back too, which doesn't help. And while some foliage elements have been added, many others have been deleted, leaving some regions looking outright patchy up close while also reducing lines of trees in distant vistas.

untitled
Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition, on PS4 (left) and Nintendo Switch 2 (right).

We're left, then, with brighter and sparser environs, not to mention the odd defect of tessellation not loading properly - thus removing geometric detail and leaving awkward patches of textures in respective places.

One problem with this approach is that Tomb Raider on PS4 actually cut back select features that had appeared on the original PS3 and Xbox 360 editions, including screen-space rain effects, improved shadow coverage and denser geometry - though it arguably did so with other improvements to balance the package out. This port to Switch consoles feels like the worst of all worlds.

Another obvious omission is the lack of TressFX - an early form of a strand-based hair system that animated Lara's signature ponytail. This feature made its debut in the PC version of the original Tomb Raider reboot, before getting ported to the PS4 and Xbox One Definitive Editions. We could understand its omission from the original Switch version, but Switch 2?

There are some positives, however, in the form of improved texture quality and a lock to 60 frames per second that the PlayStation 4 could not achieve. It takes PS4 Pro boost mode or PS5 back compat to get the job done. However, on Switch 2, resolution is fixed at 1080p in both docked and portable modes, which suggests Aspyr may have left a good degree of GPU headroom on the table in docked play.

The Switch 1 port, meanwhile, fixes to resolutions between 864p-900p in docked mode and 720p in portable mode while running under a 30fps cap, which it struggles to consistently reach. General gameplay can feel smooth enough, but any scenes with multiple NPCs and enemies, including shootouts and cinema scenes, drop the frame-rate into the 20s. When those characters leave or perish, the frame-rate jumps back up, perhaps suggesting a CPU bottleneck.

For the most part, Switch 1 matches the visual settings of the Switch 2 port, with the exception of the lesser console adding noticeable, distracting flicker to its shadows and a more intensive level-of-detail (LoD) culling of distant foliage. This gives the impression of a Switch 2 version that increases resolution and frame-rate over the Switch 1 version - a more direct port perhaps - which may help explain the lack of PS3 and PS4 graphics features.

Cutbacks and compromises for such an old game are perhaps understandable when looking at the Switch version of Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition, but the downgrades to the Switch 2 version cut deep and don't particularly make sense for a title released on a brand-new system. If Aspyr and Crystal Dynamics are looking to complete the trilogy with Rise and Shadow of the Tomb Raider, we can only hope for more sympathetic, feature-rich conversions that do those excellent games justice.