Despite a seemingly unlimited marketing budget, EA has been almost suspiciously quite about their upcoming Switch 2 version of EA Sports FC 26.
For a time there were even uncertainty about whether the game on Switch 2 would use the current-gen features of the PS5, Xbox Series, and PC versions or whether it would be based on the trimmed-down last-gen version available for PS4, Xbox One, and Switch 1.
With as little fanfare as possible, EA did eventually confirm that the Switch 2 version would be current-gen. Yet, while their might be content and feature parity between Switch 2 and current-gen machines, EA Sports FC 26 struggles to perform on Nintendo’s latest hardware.
At the Nintendo booth at Gamescom it only took us about 2 to 3 minutes of gameplay to discover that the Nintendo Switch 2 versions performs worse than a team poised for relegation.
The graphics looked blurry, details such as facial animations were severely reduced-down, and the crowd and stadium details at times looked like something out of the Wii-era. What’s worse, despite a trimmed down graphical presentation, the gameplay was anything but smooth, running at only 30 fps with occasional slowdowns.
The little gameplay snippet included here might make our complaints seem a bit exaggerated, but trust us, EA Sports FC 26 at times looked almost shockingly bad in docked mode.
That being said, as someone who thinks that EA’s newer football games are actually too responsive and fast, I personally quite enjoyed the slower and less responsive gameplay on Switch 2. It felt more like actual football, and when playing in handheld (as I suspect most Switch 2 players will anyway), the graphical downgrades will undoubtedly be much less noticeable.
It’s also worth keeping in mind that when FIFA originally released for the Nintendo Switch back in 2017, it ran on a modified version of the PS3/Xbox 360 version, but as EA came to grips with the machine, they eventually brought the Switch version on par with PS4 and Xbox One with EA Sports FC 24.
For now, though, let’s just say there is room for improvement, and with the release date of September 26 being only a month away, EA will have their work cut out for them in ensuring the quality of the Switch 2 version.