Just how good is cloud gaming on Nintendo Switch? The upcoming Kingdom Hearts games on Switch – including 1.5, 2.5, and the latest Kingdom Hearts 3 – are set to be purely cloud-based, with Square-Enix charging $90 for the entire collection or $50 for each individual game. Is the visual quality and input lag good enough to make this work? Does the concept even work for a system designed around take-anywhere portability? Demos are available on the eShop for the Kingdom Hearts titles, as well as other releases including Control, Guardians of the Galaxy and Hitman 3. We tested them all and the results are mixed to say the least.
First of all, the fact that demos are available on the eShop at all deserves kudos – it means that you have a chance to experience the games running on your own Switch paired with your own internet connection, and it’s those demos we’ve used in putting together this piece. Of course, the demos are also available to any Switch user, meaning you can test the games for yourself too, the only limitation being a hard 15-minute limit per user, per game.
A company called Ubitus supplies the cloud-based infrastructure – so, essentially, what appear to be tweaked PC versions of the game are hosted on remote servers. Control inputs are sent from your Switch to the cloud, where they’re processed, and game images are compressed and sent back to your screen. In an ideal world, all of these games would receive bespoke Switch ports, but more advanced titles may not be possible at all on the Nintendo handheld. In practise, for high-end games like Guardians of the Galaxy, streaming may be the only viable solution to get a playable result. This is highlighted especially with Control too, which even adds ray traced reflections to the mix – a setting we’ve never before seen running on Switch.
Both myself and John Linneman tested these titles individually. I used a 65Mbps BT fibre connection along with the mega-bandwidth leased line at Eurogamer HQ. For his part, John utilised his existing 100Mbps home connection. Based on what we’ve seen from the captures taken from the system in docked mode, Switch cloud titles deliver a 720p video stream, with the games themselves seemingly set to output a matching 720p resolution (the exception being Hitman 3 – this seems capable of outputting a native 1080p rendered image, downscaled to 720p before being beamed across the internet). Bandwidth seems to be limited as macroblocking is clearly visible on high colour, fast-moving content, looking at its least impressive when blown up to a flat panel living room display. Kingdom Hearts 3 suffers especially for this.