In August 2025, Digital Foundry’s John Linneman watched Elden Ring running on a Switch 2 at Gamescom and called it simply unacceptable. Onlookers put the demo somewhere around fifteen frames per second. So it was delayed.
It shipped on 28 August 2026. It is reviewing at 91.
That is the Metacritic figure as of 30 August, though the review count attached to it moved from 31 to 40 over about forty-eight hours depending on when you looked, which is normal for a launch week and worth stating rather than pretending the number is settled. OpenCritic has it at 88 to 89 across roughly 37 critics, with every one of them recommending it.
The six scores
Averaging the published verdicts that carry a number:
| Outlet | Score |
|---|---|
| Nintendo Life | 9 |
| RPGFan | 9.5 |
| Gamereactor UK | 9 |
| DualShockers | 9.5 |
| Meristation | 9.5 |
| TechRadar Gaming | 10 |
Mean of 9.42, which rounds to 9.5. Empire filed without a number. It called the port near faultless, which is not something arithmetic can use.
Six is a small sample against the forty-odd that exist, and the ones I could reach skew toward Nintendo-focused and enthusiast outlets, which is a real selection effect on a Switch 2 exclusive. Read the 9.5 as a reading of that sample rather than the whole field.
What nobody docked it for
Three days ago the observable story about this port was subtraction. Thinner grass across Limgrave and the Altus Plateau, a 30fps target in both modes, a year of somebody’s life spent finding milliseconds inside the content.
The foliage barely comes up.
That is the genuinely interesting result. Reviewers noticed the compromises — TheSixthAxis reports the 30fps target holding with more visible drops in demanding moments, TechRadar hit pop-in and jerky enemy animation when the screen filled up — but almost nobody translated those observations into a lower number. The complaints that survived into the scoring are about load, not about density.
Which is what a well-placed compromise looks like from the outside. Take a third of the blades out of a field and, at riding speed, a field still reads as a field. Let an enemy animation stutter while six of them close on you and the player feels it in their hands immediately. Both cuts save frame time. Only one of them costs you a point.
Porting is largely the craft of knowing which is which, and the gap between a 15fps demo and a 91 is a year of somebody making that call several thousand times.
The resolution numbers do not agree
This keeps getting reported as settled. It is not.
One set of write-ups has the game rendering from 1080p and reconstructing to QHD. Another has it at 1080p in both handheld and docked. Coverage before launch described 4K docked and 1080p handheld with DLSS doing the work. These cannot all be true, and no first-party breakdown from FromSoftware or Bandai Namco pins it down.
The figure every source does agree on is 30fps as the target in both modes, with reconstruction rather than native rendering underneath. Until somebody publishes a proper pixel count, that is the honest description.
A great game, not the best version of it
Gamereactor’s line is the one to hold onto: the Switch 2 is not the best place to play Elden Ring for the first time, and that takes nothing away from being able to play something this size on a train.
Nearly every review lands in that same shape. The 9s are for Elden Ring, which was already a 96 in 2022 and has not changed. The port’s own contribution is that it does not get in the way — which sounds like faint praise and is actually the entire brief when you are fitting a 2022 open world designed around a mains socket into a 33ms budget you can hold.
The package is $79.99 with Shadow of the Erdtree included, plus two starting classes and Torrent skins that also went to PlayStation, Xbox and PC the same day as a separate pack. So the exclusive content stopped being exclusive immediately, and what you are buying is the port.
On the evidence of six scores and a 91, the port is the good part.
Scores collected 30 August 2026 from published reviews; the average is the plain mean of the six that carry a number, rounded to the nearest half point. Release date, price and package contents confirmed against Bandai Namco’s product listings. The roughly 15fps Gamescom figure was widely reported from hands-off viewing in August 2025 and never published by FromSoftware. Internal resolution is unconfirmed and sources disagree, as described above.