Elden Ring: Tarnished Edition Review – A New Way To Experience A Classic

Elden Ring has entranced minds, frustrated gamers, and created a sense of wonder since 2022. If you’ve never played Elden Ring, whether that’s because you were never interested or because you only owned a Switch, today’s your lucky day! Fellow Tarnished, your Switch 2 is ready for its first site of grace.  Elden Ring: Tarnished Edition gives us two new character bases and my personal favorite, a chance to start the journey all over again.

Game Name: Elden Ring: Tarnished Edition
Platform(s): Xbox Series X/S, PS5, PC, and Nintendo Switch 2
Reviewed on: Nintendo Switch 2
Developer: FromSoftware
Publisher: Bandai Namco
Release Date: August 28th, 2026

I am so happy to see that Elden Ring and Shadow of the Erdtree are coming to the Switch 2. A new audience will fall to the whims of gravity, fighting an endgame boss at level one, and making their way to becoming Elden Lord. If you were dancing with the idea of getting a Switch 2, I would say that now is the time to buy. With how many titles are getting either a bump up in FPS, a remaster, or making their Switch 2 debut, it’s the perfect time to invest in this console.

A New Way to Play Elden Ring

Never in my wildest dreams did I think that Elden Ring would find its way to the Switch. I’m so excited for everyone whose only console is a Switch 2 to experience this game. Now, while I do have a bias for Elden Ring and Shadow of the Erdtree (platinumed it twice, the first time on Xbox, the second time on Steam), there are still some things left to be desired with this port. Firstly, the lighting is incredibly dark in certain parts. When it comes to games and the ambiance they create, I’m a huge proponent of leaving the world as it was designed unless it needs to be changed by the player for accessibility reasons.

I would highly recommend ramping up the lighting in settings, then adjusting image quality and changing it to your preferred setting from there. When I first started in Castleward Tunnel, it was incredibly dark; I couldn’t see much besides the site of grace, identifiers like the way to the boss, and the way I came into the tunnel.  When I changed the settings, I felt the change was only incremental, and not substantially helpful. I could see a bit more, but it was still dark.
Another thing that I thought would have been fixed this time around, is the ability to enhance the font-size in Elden Ring and its DLC. Launching on a new console has its trials and tribulations, but with how big FromSoftware is, I would have expected them to amp up the accessibility features this time around. If you can add two new classes, you can add accessibility that helps players maneuver throughout the beautiful world you’ve built. I’ve always been a critic of FromSoftware’s accessibility in Elden Ring. I guess I should just put these foolish ambitions to rest.

Why Get Elden Ring on The Switch 2?

So why now, why get Elden Ring now? Having been available for four years on Xbox, PS5, and PC, why release this game on a new system now and not when it first launched? Now I don’t have interviews in my back pocket to pull out for this review to give you a definitive answer, but I do have an educated guess as to why. Firstly, reaching a wider audience is key. FromSoftware probably saw a gap in the market that wasn’t being filled by Elden Ring and wanted to fix that. Also, exclusives are a big move in the FromSoftware playbook; that’s not to say that’s a negative thing, it just is what it is.

In the Switch 2 version of Elden Ring: Tarnished Edition, there are two new classes available, Idus Knight and Heavy Knight. Much like the console exclusivity of Bloodborne or Demon’s Souls to the PlayStation, having classes locked behind a Switch 2 copy of Elden Ring will be reason enough for people to buy it. The two new classes, by the way, are incredibly fun to play around with. Just imagine a bleed build with the Idus Knight?  Do I think the exclusivity of two classes is a bit much, yes, but I also think It might be there as an incentive to buy Elden Ring on the Switch 2. Amongst a plethora of things, come over to the dark side, we have NPC’s with main character syndrome, and an entrancing world to get lost in.

Mechanics, Flow, and Re-Playability

As for my experience and how the game flowed on the Switch 2, I didn’t find any major issues. Other than what I’ve mentioned, it was like I was playing Elden Ring on the PC or console post-patches. No, not the annoying, kick you down a hole Patches. Margit the Fell Omen was just as mad as ever that I was there, and Melina created a cozy spot near a site of grace for me to sit. I would catch myself getting lost in the world, looking back at the clock, and two hours had passed.

Playing this game was incredibly smooth with stable performance. I was crossing my fingers that everything would work the way it’s supposed to, and I’m so happy that it did. Moving through the world, I was trying to do several things at once to “break the game” so to speak. Like riding Torrent while fighting enemies that you find out in the world, or randomly falling from great heights, just to see if the game would crash, and there was nothing. No crashes, blips, or even pop-ins. I think people who only own a Switch 2 or who own multiple consoles, plus a Switch 2, will love the port of this game. While, of course, there are no achievements, it’s nice to roam the world, explore, experiment with builds, and do things you might not want to do on your main build.

As someone who owns every console (plus a Steam Deck and PC), the only thing that gets tricky is remembering which buttons are which when going from playing PS5 to the Switch 2. Besides getting used to the button layout, this port is everything I could have hoped for. I really love the fact that the pop-ins are non-existent, which is rare for a lot of Switch games to not have on release, or before the first wave of patches come out.

PC Versus The Switch 2

I took a look at how the game performs across console, PC, Steam Deck, and now the Switch 2. I’d like to focus in for a moment comparing the game’s performance on the Switch 2 versus the PC. Since the PC is what I have the most hours in, sitting at 120 hours, I feel like it’s the fairest piece of tech to use as a comparison. When the PC version of Elden Ring launched, it was a mess; now, keep in mind, I didn’t get the PC version until a year later. While several patches came out, and efforts were taken to make the best possible version it could be, it was still a hot mess.

Playing Elden Ring: Tarnished Edition on the Switch 2 feels like FromSoftware learned from the PC release and shipped a smooth, day-one version with no performance issues. Other than the issues I mention in this review, which I feel are more quality-of-life fixes than a day-one patch. The Switch 2 version, by far, runs smoother than the PC version when it launched. While the PC version of Elden Ring runs really well, there will still be minor performance issues from time to time. With the Switch 2 version, I feel that this might be the best the game has been optimized. Who knows, I might find some issues later on, but as of now, the performance of Elden Ring: Tarnished Edition is incredible!

Final Thoughts

I greatly enjoyed my time so far with the Switch 2 port of Elden Ring! While the image quality/brightness suffers a bit in handheld mode, I saw no visible bugs, issues, pop-ins, or anything that hindered the gameplay experience.  If you’ve been wanting to check out Elden Ring and its DLC, but had no way to play until now, I would highly recommend investing in Elden Ring: Tarnished Edition!

Elden Ring: Tarnished Edition will release August 28th, 2026, for Nintendo Switch 2

Review Disclosure Statement: Elden Ring: Tarnished Edition was provided to us by Bandai Namco. For more information on how we review video games and other media/technology, please review our Review Guideline/Scoring Policy.