When Playtonic’s Yooka-Replaylee released in Fall 2025, it delighted many upon release. It took the promising core of the original Yooka-Laylee and refined it into an even better 3D platformer adventure.
However, its original Switch 2 release did not run at 60 FPS like other versions. After receiving feedback from the community, Playtonic releases a Performance Mode update on Switch 2, live today!
What is Yooka-Replaylee?
When I originally reviewed Yooka-Replaylee, I said the following about my time with this collect-a-thon adventure.
As someone who enjoyed their time with the original Yooka-Laylee, I was eager to see how Playtonic applied lessons learned from Impossible Lair and other modern platformers into this revisit of their original adventure. With a strong presentation, fantastic controls, improved gameplay, and a combined combo of improved progress and level design, Yooka-Replaylee is a fantastic experience. It is the realization of what the team at Playtonic set out to create back in 2017, and I’m eager to see what the team has in store for their next adventure for Yooka & Laylee.
Needless to say, I loved my time with the game on PC. And the adventure only gets better for Switch 2 owners with a brand-new Performance Mode, available in both Handheld and Docked modes!
Refining the Pages – The New Performance & Fidelity Modes
Playtonic said the following on their official news page regarding this welcome addition to the Switch 2 release, now out as of this writing.
Following the update, Yooka-Replaylee will now run in Performance Mode by default, allowing you to jump straight into the 60fps action. For those who prefer a higher quality image over frame rate, we have included a “Fidelity Mode” under the options menu. Selecting this will lock the frame rate to 30fps but provides a graphical bump, ensuring the world looks its absolute best for players who value visual crispness above all else.
There is now also a free demo of the game with both modes, so you can try before you buy.
Behind the Book – Developer Insights via Nintendo Life Interview
Adding this heavily requested feature was no simple feat, however, and Nintendo Life breaks down the process Playtonic went through to get 60 FPS on Nintendo Switch 2. You can read the full interview here, but my favorite quote from it was the following statement:
It’s easy to underestimate the challenge it is to get a game like this to run at higher frame rates. Yooka-Replaylee’s worlds are large and full of life, and the player has completely free rein to move wherever they want, and face the camera in any direction they want. This can mean we have thousands of objects that need to be drawn at any one time, as well as all the new graphical effects we have brought to the remake, this is all very costly both on the CPU and GPU. The process to provide a performance mode is a long one, painstakingly profiling problem areas of each level, not only diagnosing noticeably costly areas for optimisation, but also requiring tackling countless smaller optimisations that all add up to something that helps. It’s a very time-consuming process. We have had to restructure much of the backgrounds, as well as making many optimisations that set us back a long way in terms of stability, which takes time to regain.
It was not an easy process getting the Switch 2 to run the game at 60 FPS, as explained above. However, Playtonic still went ahead with optimizing since the game’s October 2025 launch for Switch 2 owners, and the results speak for themselves.
The fact that Playtonic, alongside other major third-party developers, is making the effort to release fantastic running experiences on Switch 2 hardware is something I immensely appreciate.
