Astral Chain is available for pre-load on the Switch eShop, which means that we now know how much space it will take up on your console.
Platinum Games’ Astral Chain doesn’t come out until the end of August, but as of today, it’s available to pre-load for those who purchased it on the Switch eShop. If you buy the game digitally, you’ll need 9.6GB available to download it.
That 9.6GB file size makes Astral Chain fairly hefty by Switch standards. For comparison, plenty of popular games like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim clock in at above 14GB, and some games, such as Doom, can take up more than 20GB. Given that the Switch comes with 32GB of internal memory, you likely won’t have any trouble finding space for Astral Chain unless you keep a lot of other massive games installed on the system.
Astral Chain’s eShop listing says that the game supports two-player co-op, something that the game’s director, Takahisa Tauro, revealed to Kotaku during E3. However, he spoke about the feature as if it weren’t necessarily an official multiplayer mode for the game, saying “generally what I wanted to do is have one player control two characters at the same time.” That makes it interesting to see a two-player mode listed officially. According to Tauro, co-op is achieved by detaching the Joy-Cons and having a different player use each one during combat, which lets one person control the main character while the other controls their Legion partner.
The eShop also lists cloud save support as “pending.” What that means for the final game is anyone’s guess at this point, as it still has more than a month and a half to change before release.
From what we’ve seen so far, Astral Chain looks like a stylish, quirky brawler that should be a great addition to the Switch’s catalog. It could be worth clearing out a few gigs for it when it launches Aug 30.
