Nintendo Switch 2 Review – One week with the new generation handheld
The Nintendo Switch 2 launched to somewhat mixed expectations, but it’s safe to say that with record-break sales through its first weekend, Nintendo has knocked this one out of the park. This is a very safe console — a more straightforward upgrade than what we’ve typically seen from this company — but one that expands and refines the original vision for the Switch.
Screen time
It starts with the hardware itself. While the Switch OLED was able to improve on the original design — bringing more solidity to the body, a more robust kickstand and better quality screen, the Switch 2 is able to kick on in areas that the OLED couldn’t. The screen is much larger, jumping from the original’s 6.2” and the OLED’s 7” to a more modern 7.9″, increasing the height of the console in the process, and there’s a new profile that’s more gently rounded at the back but has a sharper edge to the flat faced front. The kickstand has iterated on the Switch OLED’s design, using the same adjustable hinges, but having a cutout foot instead of the whole lower half of the back panel. It feels a bit flimsier, but it’s just as sturdy in practice.
Of course, this isn’t an OLED screen, it’s a reversion to an LCD panel. While this might be a downgrade in screen technology, it’s a vast improvement from the original Switch. This is a 1080p panel, it can do 120Hz with VRR, and there is a limited form of HDR – it’s not amazing HDR, but it does have an effect. The laminated screen brings the picture right up to the glass, giving better contrast and blacks, while also being powerfully bright and vibrantly colourful. It’s a nice screen, but one that will almost certainly be succeeded by a premium OLED revision down the line.
Part of the cost of this, both with the new chipset and the larger screen, is that battery life has slid back to a 2 to 6.5 hour range – less than the Switch OLED and roughly equivalent to the original Switch. This is obviously heavily dependent on how taxing the game is, the brightness and volume settings you have and other factors, but it feels about right. You’ll get a couple hour of Mario Kart out of it before wanting to charge, and that can be more convenient with USB-C at top and bottom of the console.
With the larger tablet body comes taller Joy-Con 2 on the side. These have a more rounded, softer feel in the hand, and attach with magnets instead of a metal rail, snapping in and out of place in a very satisfying fashion. We’ll have to wait and see how much creaking and flexing comes to affect these connectors over time, as they did with the Switch, but the initial concerns over their durability can be put to one side. It’s a bizarre quirk, but you can attach Joy-Con 2 upside-down and back to front, and the fact that this is possible through a purely symmetrical design is actually a good thing. Permitting mistakes makes things harder to break.
The increased size of the Joy-Con 2 allows for larger SR/SL rail buttons, so they’re used directly instead of having larger buttons on the wrist strap rail (which also satisfyingly uses magnets), and there’s even space for the optical sensor to enable mouse mode. Time will tell whether Joy-Con drift has a sequel — the Joy-Con 2 does not have Hall Effect analogue sticks — but the analogue sticks do now have full-sized heads to match standard game pads, even if the height is still shrunk down.
Softly does it
On to the software, we have a light revision of the Switch’s UI. The games are now rounded squares instead of pointed, the system icons are encased in a unified bar instead of being individual circles, and the highlighted icon now has a more animated colour instead of pulsing.
It is, however, significantly faster in very obvious areas. The Switch could choke and die just loading into the eShop, whereas the new eShop on the Switch 2 just breezes through the massive lists of game icons. And when it comes to downloads, having SSD performance from both the internal 256GB and the new MicroSD Express standard allows you to download at full fibre internet speeds. Whether over gigabit Ethernet or WiFi 6, the Switch 2 can pull down a game at up to 400Mbps (though has more commonly been around 250–300Mbps in my experience) using my gigabit internet speeds. That’s not maxing out my connection, of course, but it’s fast enough.
The new Nintendo Switch 2 eShop homepage
And you’ll want and need that for the larger games that we’re seeing on Switch 2. Hitman: World of Assassination is 58GB, Yakuza 0 Director’s Cut is 45GB, and if they need to patch, prepare yourself for the console to demand enough space to re-write the entire game while updating. That 256GB internal storage can and will feel pretty small after a few of these ported PlayStation and Xbox staples, so the price of MicroSD Express cards can’t come down quickly enough.
New Nintendo quirks
The Switch 2 brings two core features to the table: GameChat and GameShare. GameChat is Nintendo finally getting onboard with built-in voice chat — they even dedicated a whole button to it! It works well, within the company’s typically constrained system. The first hitch comes when enabling GameChat, which requires a phone number to be attached to your Nintendo account in advance — without that, you’ll likely get a blank white screen that offers no help, the unstated fix being to add the number via a web browser before try. Then you manually approve which of your friends you like enough to want to talk to, adding a further layer to needing to still use friend codes. But once you’ve jumped through the hoops, voice chat is… fine.
The audio quality from the built-in microphone does an OK job of relaying what people are saying, though you will be best using a headset. What’s curious is the desire to have the chat tiles along the bottom of the screen, shrinking the play screen down above it — It’s like a Zoom call where the main tile is your game. This is acceptable when on a large TV, but you really feel the smaller play area when in handheld. Thankfully there are three layout settings, so you can have smaller thumbnails or just have the game full screen while anyone that’s speaking is highlighted in the top corner.
Of course, the intention is that people have cameras turned on and share their game screen. I do like having the camera enabled — it’s quite a bit of fun for Mario Kart where your face appears in-game — and there’s good Nvidia-powered features to track your face, blur backgrounds and the like… but when everyone’s gameplay is streamed at just 10fps, it’s much more of a distracting judder than it should be.
It could be made more elegant: for example, it could start full screen and indicate whether someone starts us using a camera, while speakers could be represented by avatars instead of names, and the chat icons positioned by the player to avoid blocking the UI. It’s a decent start that I hope will be improved over time.
GameShare, meanwhile, is the Switch 2’s replacement for DS Download Play, and a cleverly adapted take on PlayStation’s Share Play and Steam’s Remote Play Together. The host invites people to join them for GameShare, the Switch 2 then renders and streams the game to everyone else’s devices. But there’s a unique twist in that every player can have their own view, instead of sharing the full screen. In 51 Clubhouse Games, you can all have your own secret hand of cards; in Fast Fusion, you each have a full view instead of having the split-screen. Well… I say “full”, but there’s an infuriating info bar announcing that this is GameShare on the top of the screen that actually shrinks your view. Why, Nintendo? Why is this not just a bubble in the corner of the screen?
It’s an ingenious twist, something that nobody else is doing, even if it’s inherently limited. GameShare has to be enabled by developers on a game-by-game basis, and within that it’s specified whether games can be shared via local WiFi and via GameChat, and whether it can work with the original Switch as well. The encoded stream is good — it’s NVENC, after all — but it can struggle with something like Fast Fusion, where the world is whizzing by at lightning speed.
Launch library
Turning to the games, we see where the Switch 2 is currently at its weakest. Mario Kart World is the only truly essential game for this console right now, though anti-grav racing connoisseurs would argue for Fast Fusion. Aside from that, current Switch 2 gaming is really all about upgrades, ports, patches and backward compatibility, and the future holds plenty of cross-gen games as Nintendo tries to cling onto the vast Switch playerbase for as long as possible.
It’s not as exciting, but the Switch 2 holds up very well in the comparisons. Cyberpunk 2077 Ultimate Edition is a very good port that makes the most of DLSS to deliver 1080p30 consistently on Switch 2, comparing very favourably to the Xbox Series S, albeit with more limited resolution and performance targets. Hitman: World of Assassination is an all-encompassing collection that performs handily, and Yakuza 0 is a good port of a game that really doesn’t trouble the Switch 2 in the slightest.
There’s all the games that have received Switch 2 patches. Lumping the paid Switch 2 Editions of Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom in here alongside free updates to ARMS, Super Mario Odyssey, Link’s Awakening, Echoes of Wisdom and more, you’ve got a range of improvements, from resolution bumps, to frame rates, added HDR and the addition of GameShare in multiplayer games.
The difference is more noticeable in some games than others. The stuttering of Link’s Awakening has been vanquished, BOTW and TOTK jump up to 60fps, and Pokémon Scarlet & Violet is just a night and day difference — it’s staggering how naff it still is on the original Switch.
But then there’s the rest of the Switch back catalogue — all the games with troubled performance and the “impossible” ports. The Switch 2 runs these games through a translation layer, similar to Apple’s Rosetta and Valve’s Proton, dynamically translating calls to match new APIs and chip capabilities, and the results can lift a lot of games with troubled performance out of the mire. Bayonetta 3 is basically a locked 60fps now instead of lurching back and forth in the 40’s and 50’s; Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity locks to 30fps and Fire Emblem: Three Hopes shoots up to 60fps with its unlocked frame rate, and on, and on. The impact will be constrained by frame rate caps and resolution limits, so all of these games would benefit from a patch to add Switch 2 appropriate performance profiles, but at a base level this is a major improvement.
