Woo-hoo!

Yooka-Laylee finally arrives on Switch today, and as you'll know if you've already consulted our review, it was worth the wait. Playtonic has personally handled conversion duties this time around (Team17 ported the PS4 and Xbox One editions earlier in the year) and the developer has taken an inordinate amount of care in bringing the game to Nintendo's machine; the result is perhaps the most appealing version of Yooka-Laylee yet, thanks to the fact that you can play it anywhere.

But don't just take our word for it - those studious chaps over at Digital Foundry have done their own analysis and have stated that the Switch port is a "superb" piece of technical work and optimisation.

If you're interesting in pure performance data, Yooka-Laylee runs at around 30fps. In docked mode, it boasts a resolution of 900p, while the portable mode runs at 600p. Playtonic hasn't just dialled down the detail for the Nintendo version - it has re-done certain models and changed a lot of the graphical effects to ensure that this port looks as good as it possibly can - vindicating the team's decision to hold the game back until it was just right.

Playtonic's senior software engineer Simon Gerges spoke to Digital Foundry about the delay:

Back in September we were suffering from a few issues that had been fixed/improved in a later version of Unity than the one we were using. Unfortunately, the performance on that version was slightly worse for us than the version we had been optimising with, so we were unable to take it. To get these fixes we ended up requesting them as a patch for the Unity version that we were using instead. The main one of interest being an HDR colour format which improved the visuals over the one our Unity version supported for Switch at the time.

Let us know if Digital Foundry's findings chime with your own experiences by leaving a comment below.

[source eurogamer.net]