Rime: review on Nintendo Switch

BASIC GAME INFORMATION

 

Year of construction: 17 November 2017 
Genre: Adventure games
developer: Tequila Works
Publisher: Gray Box

Rime is an incredibly beautiful adventure with an open world and puzzles. In the game Rime, the main character is a little boy who needs to get out of this mysterious island and get rid of a terrible and oppressive curse.

GAME ENGINE

The basis for RiME is the Unreal Engine 4 game engine, developed and supported by Epic Games. 

Thanks to his work, each playthrough of the game is unique and inimitable, which increases the replay value of the game. The first game created on the engine, Unreal, appeared in 1998. Since then, various versions of this game engine have been used in more than a hundred games, including Deus Ex, Dishonored, Lineage II, Thief: Deadly Shadows, Postal 2, the Brothers in Arms series, Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell, Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six, as well as in the famous game series Unreal and Unreal Tournament from Epic Games themselves. Being primarily adapted for first-person shooters, the engine was also used to create games of other genres.   

Written in the high-level C++ language, Unreal Engine 4 enables the creation of games for most operating systems and platforms: Microsoft Windows, Linux, Mac OS and Mac OS X, Xbox, Xbox 360, PlayStation 2, PlayStation Portable, PlayStation 3, Wii, Dreamcast and Nintendo GameCube consoles. In December, Mark Rein demonstrated the Unreal Engine 3 engine running on the iPod Touch and iPhone 3GS. In March 2010, the engine was demonstrated running on the Palm Pre communicator, which is based on the webOS mobile platform.

 

To simplify porting, the engine uses a modular system of dependent components: it supports various rendering systems (Direct3D, OpenGL, Pixomatic; previously supported were Glide API, S3 Metal, PowerVR SGL), sound playback (EAX, OpenAL, DirectSound3D; previously supported were A3D), text-to-speech playback tools, speech recognition (only for Xbox360, PlayStation 3, Nintendo Wii and Microsoft Windows, also planned for Linux and Mac), modules for working with the network and support for various input devices. 

The following technologies are supported for online play: Windows Live, Xbox Live, and GameSpy, including up to 64 players (clients) simultaneously. Although the development tools do not officially include support for a large number of clients on a single server, the engine has been used to create MMORPG games. One of the most famous representatives of the genre, Lineage II, uses the Unreal Engine.

TECHNICAL INFORMATION

Rime on Nintendo Switch is version 1.1. When purchasing a game in a store Nintendo downloads it to a MicroSD card or internal memory.

The total size of the downloaded game is about 7.5 gigabytes, which is similar to the PC version.

CONTROL

The control settings are standard, as for other consoles. There are not so many control buttons in the game, that is, not all of them are used on the console.

 The control hints are quite stylized.

SETTINGS

But there are practically no graphics settings in the game; all that is available to us is the brightness setting.

Well, then let’s see how the game differs from the PC version.

MODES COMPARISON between Nintendo Switch and PC

Now let's compare it with the PC version of the project. “Very low”, “medium”, “low”, “high” settings were taken as the basis. 

As we can see, the game is inferior only to the maximum settings on PC, and it is also clear that the developers have worked on the color scheme in the Nintendo Switch, making it a little more pleasant.

Well, in the second case, in terms of detail and everything else, the picture would also be slightly inferior to the maximum PC settings, if not for the absence of shadows from trees, which were removed apparently for stability and improved performance.

But all the same, the picture is simply unique, for such a heavy game.

COMPARISON OF TV PORTABLE MODE

In this review, we decided to compare the rendering quality of stationary and portable modes, since this time the game looks a little better in TV mode:

As we can see, due to the peculiarities of the engine, switching to portable mode with a decrease in resolution rendering somewhat affects the quality of the picture.

OVERALL GAMING IMPRESSION

Rime, when transferred to the Nintendo Switch, has not lost its charm - the game all plays just as easily and naturally. In fact, this is the first multi-platform adventure game of this genre in Unreal Engine 4, which came out as Switch feels pretty good, showing quite a sane picture.

 

 

Of course, in portable mode, the rendering resolution drops to the level of low settings on a PC, but due to the small screen, the loss of visual quality is small.

GAME PROCESS

Well, below are the first 12 minutes on the console itself:

 Disadvantages:

- noticeable “by eye” reduction in rendering in portable mode

Advantages:

- the first rather heavy game for Nintendo Switch on Unreal Engine 4, which visually looks almost at the level of PCs and other consoles (in TV mode)

- slightly lower price about other Nintendo games

1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 Rating 80% [7 vote(s)]