Grounded was never the most obvious candidate to go multi-platform from its Xbox home, but we were pleased to see it featured in the February Partner Direct, all the same. Right from this initial announcement, we had some trepidations about how this big world would hold up on Switch — fears that were proven legitimate when the game was released last week.
In our 6/10 review, we found that Grounded served up a lot of fun but the Switch port was let down by performance issues and necessary graphical downgrades. And it appears that we were not alone in our gameplay problems as Digital Foundry has today published a technical rundown of Grounded on Switch, and it ain't pretty.
We'll dive in with the FPS numbers, so you can get an idea of where we stand. While the outlet praises the Switch port's ability to even keep Grounded running, it does note that there are frame time drops a-plenty. The port seems to run at 30FPS in quieter open spaces, though it is prone to dropping into the 20s when things get busy.
Grounded on Switch is also guilty of consistent stutters when autosaving kicks in — something that you will also find on the PS5 version, mind you — and is home to extensive visual cutbacks.
Things aren't much better on the resolution front. In docked mode, the Switch version of Grounded sits around the 600p mark of its 720p-360p range. This is lower when played in handheld (as you might expect), though Digital Foundry does note that the smaller screen helps cover some of the visual downgrades like consistent pop-in and long texture loading times.
All in all, Digital Foundry's Thomas Morgan considers the Switch port of Grounded a hard one to recommend. You can find the full technical analysis in the video at the top of this article and check out our thoughts down below.