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So we were eager this week to try out an early copy of Bethesda's Switch port of the 2016 Doom reboot , which hits Nintendo's newest console tomorrow. After a few hours with the game, we found a port that's surprisingly playable, although noticeably scaled down from its preceding versions.

In portable mode, it's still a bit of a wonder that a game as detailed and rich as Doom is possible at all. After years of dealing with relatively low-res screens on dedicated gaming portables, seeing Doom's smooth, 720p image in the palm of your hand is a remarkable step up, especially on a 6.2" display. At this scale, the pixels are packed tightly enough that everything looks "retina display" crisp, with a smooth frame rate to boot.

The main problem in portable mode is that Doom's UI hasn't been scaled at all to account for the smaller display. Subtitle and instruction text is unreadably small on the Switch screen unless you lean in really close, and health and ammo information is only slightly larger.

Playing on the small screen has an impact on gameplay, too, making far-off enemies and small item pickups a bit harder to distinguish from their surroundings. Some explicit options to highlight enemies and increase the display text size when playing in portable mode would have been a nice touch.

I also found the Switch Joy-Con analog sticks a little touchy when it comes to precise, reflex-heavy first-person aiming. The small sticks leave very little physical space between the center position and a full push to the edge, making small aiming adjustments more difficult than on other gamepads. If you can play with a Switch Pro Controller, do it.

Blown up to a big HDTV, you start to notice the graphical compromises that have been made to run Doom on the Switch. On the plus side, everything still runs at a smooth and constant 30 frames per second, with no stuttering that I could see. It's a noticeable step down from the 60fps you'd get on a more powerful console, but it's still entirely playable. Enemies still have the same wonderfully expressive movement animation as in the past, and a motion-blur toggle lets you limit the motion sickness potential of quick turns.

When it comes to the quality of those individual frames, though, the downscaled visuals are quite noticeable (even for someone who often balks at the pixel-counters' obsession with resolution ). Compared to previous versions of Doom, everything looks much fuzzier on the Switch, with muddier textures and more noticeable sharp polygonal edges. This is especially true when you view enemies and items up close or see explosions and particle effects that have a bit less pop than you might expect.

It's not impossible to look at by any means (as you can see in the above gallery) and everything is still perfectly readable from a gameplay perspective. The fact that a small, relatively cheap portable system like the Switch is capable of running a passable version of a recent high-end release like Doom is an achievement in and of itself. Just don't go in expecting the Switch version to be competitive with larger, more-powerful hardware designed for the TV (or a PC monitor).

Below are some screens taken from last year's PC release of Doom for comparison's sake.