Infinite’s lighting has taken the hardest hit of the three – being the most recent and graphically advanced of the three titles – with god-rays that have obvious shimmering and lower resolution, splotchier shadows. Shadow maps are somewhat jaggier around the edges, but not near as much as you’d expect. Where the textures are lower resolution you’ll likely not notice, because your eyes aren’t being drawn to those locations.Įven lighting, an area most Switch ports axe with absolute abandon, remains largely intact in comparison to the other console editions of the games. Sure, you could always slowly walk forward and watch the assets transform from low-rez mud to high-rez spectacle, but the distance Virtuos settled on is as close to a Goldilocks range as they could get. Texture filtering and draw distance are both lower (especially in Infinite), but Virtuos made it so textures would gently fade into view rather than abruptly pop-in, which makes the effect virtually unnoticeable while playing the games. There are obvious graphical downgrades here, but you have to go out of your way to spot them. New textures or not, the BioShock trio all remain easy on the eyes, and this has proven a boon for the Switch ports. Sure, the remaster of the first BioShock culled much of the specular lighting that helped set the mood, and the audio mix remains evenly leveled and without reverb, but the art style has aged gracefully. I bring this up, because all three titles run spectacularly on the Nintendo Switch without any dire graphical compromises. If you took umbrage with the choices made in the remasters all those years ago then this second release will do nothing to calm your ire. The work Blind Squirrel put into each remaster remains commendable, but many of their less worthy changes remain. This being The Collection that was ported over means we’re getting BioShock: Remastered and BioShock 2: Remastered – with all their improvements and more questionable alterations. Thankfully, 2K and partner Virtuos have knocked all three games well out of the underwater park and into the stratosphere. While BioShock, BioShock 2, and BioShock Infinite all remain excellent games, a bad port is a bad port, capable of tarnishing even the best games’ luster. BioShock: The Collection has been around for four years now, but the bundle has only just arrived on the Nintendo Switch.

Bioshock 2 switch