Star Wars: Republic Commando Dev Investigating Poor Performance On Switch

Aspyr’s recent port of Star Wars: Republic Commando hasn’t exactly gone down well with Nintendo Switch owners.

Released last week for the hybrid console following leaks outing its existence, users who picked up the squad-based shooter set in a galaxy far, far away immediately noticed glaring performance issues. Numerous videos showcasing the 16-year-old title’s inconsistent frame rate have already been uploaded to YouTube, some of which depict playback dipping as low as 20 FPS. The two industry standards widely adopted by most developers, of course, are 30 and 60 FPS, with the former increasingly being phased out as technology continues to improve.

While not as powerful as even Sony or Microsoft’s last-gen machines, the Switch is capable of hitting both targets despite its modest hardware (results vary wildly on a per-game basis) and certainly should have no trouble maintaining a solid 60 for a title originally launched more than a decade ago. That being the case, the problem here appears to be one of poor optimization or a bug and one that Aspyr says it’s currently looking into.

A response received by Reddit user brokowska420 after contacting the company’s customer support reads as follows:

Hello, thanks for reaching out to Aspyr Support.

We appreciate you reaching out about this issue. Our devs are currently investigating the Switch’s performance and low frame rates, hopefully we’ll be able to resolve them soon. We appreciate your support, and apologies for the frustration.

We’ll close this issue for now, but we’ll tag it, and if a fix is released we’ll let you know! If you have any other questions or concerns, send us a new message and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.

The statement has been criticized as non-committal by others responding to the thread, with some even opting to boycott future Aspyr products due to its perceived incompetence. With no ETA on when (or even if) these unfortunate circumstances are resolved, we’d recommend that anyone unsatisfied with Star Wars: Republic Commando‘s port reach out to Nintendo customer support for a refund, though mileage on that front will vary wildly depending on your region.

Have you been experiencing similar issues to those described above, though? Let us know in the usual place below!