Nintendo Switch 2 Early Review: A Safe Bet

For Better And Worse, The Nintendo Switch 2 Is a Safe Bet

After months of buildup and a predictably stressful pre-order bonanza, the Switch 2 is finally on store shelves, tempting Nintendo heads to drop $450 so they can be the first one on the block with the newest thing. As the direct successor to a console that will likely surpass the PlayStation 2 as the highest-selling game system of all time, Nintendo’s latest comes with sky-high expectations: how could it possibly match the craze and stacked lineup of its predecessor, a hybrid that blended home consoles and handhelds in a way we’ll never be able to go back from? How can you top a simple yet ingenious idea like that? The easy answer is that you don’t. Instead of reinventing itself, the Nintendo Switch 2 takes an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” stance, maintaining the flexibility of its predecessor while also delivering a much-needed hardware upgrade.

To start with the benefits of this iterative approach, the Switch 2 makes it extremely simple to move things over from the previous console, allowing you to transfer your games, save files, and silly screenshots you accidentally took while flailing during a boss fight, all in a few minutes. Considering Nintendo’s mixed track record with this sort of thing, this ease of use is a nice surprise, and doubly so when you consider that backward compatibility hasn’t always been a priority for new system releases. There’s an immediate comfort in seeing the Switch 2’s familiar UI populating with your favorite time wasters and longtime backlog candidates as you say, “Hey, this new thing I just bought already has stuff on it.” Even some of the Switch 1’s peripherals still work, and I was able to connect my Pro Controller in a matter of seconds.

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As for the juicier hardware upgrades, the results are immediately noticeable. The original Switch came out over eight years ago, and that age has only gotten heavier each year as the system has struggled to keep up. Before even getting into any games, booting up the Switch 2 on my TV immediately sold the importance of 4K with HDR support, lending a much more vivid, high-contrast image. In handheld mode, the larger screen and higher resolution display (the Switch 2 is 1080p while its predecessor was 780p) also made quite an impact. And when I eventually began playing some games, the results only became more impressive.

The best showcase came after begrudgingly forking over $10 for the Switch 2 upgrade of Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. When I booted the original version, I was immediately reminded that, despite the game’s many strengths, the Switch was fighting for its life to run it properly: the art design held things together, but the framerate was choppy and the visuals were aliased to hell and back, especially when playing on TV. By contrast, when I played the upgraded Switch 2 edition, things looked and played much better across the board. It ran at what seemed to be a stable 60 frames per second, and the world was dramatically sharper, offering a very convincing side-by-side comparison that made it clear this is a better way to journey through Hyrule (aside from the significant financial burdens involved).

While this was the easiest to measure before-and-after scenario for the Switch 1 and 2, I also played several games I had seen before on non-Nintendo systems: Yakuza 0’s operatics looked the same as I remembered, Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess’ colorful depiction of Japanese folklore remained striking, and the newly released Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma ran without a hitch. And outside of Tears of the Kingdom, I was probably most impressed with Street Fighter 6; the game felt nearly as responsive on an undocked Switch as it does on my RTX 3080-equipped PC hooked up to a high refresh-rate monitor. While it’s certainly not a replacement for my other setup—the Switch 2 isn’t compatible with my fight stick and I would have to play over Wi-Fi like a war criminal—this showed off the device’s 120Hz monitor and proved it can run relatively graphically intensive titles in handheld mode without sacrificing precision. Digital Foundry has even reported that some original Switch games run better on the Switch 2 without requiring players to purchase an upgraded version, meaning that not only can you easily access your library from the old system, but they might play smoother, too.

In many ways, it sounds like everything you could ever want out of something called the Switch 2. But of course, there’s a catch, or well, a few of them actually: the system costs $450, many of its first-party games will cost $80, and its launch lineup is thin, to say the least. The first and second points have been covered quite a bit, so I’ll just say those are steep prices given the robber-baron hell world we inhabit.

As for the Switch 2 exclusives available at launch, things are fairly dire if you aren’t interested in blue shelling your friends in Mario Kart World (or if you don’t want to fork over 80 bucks). While I haven’t played enough to fully appraise it yet, the game doesn’t strike me as enough to carry the load on its own, and the only other exclusives I’m aware of are the F-Zero-styled Fast Fusion and Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour, a $10 tech demo that absolutely should have been included for free.

Again, between the titles previously released on other systems making their way to the Switch 2, the many backward-compatible games, and the Switch 1 releases with $10 HD upgrades, there are plenty of things to play on the Switch 2, just not a lot of exclusives to entice you to buy this one console in particular unless you’re in desperate need of a beefier hybrid system that will (probably) eventually have some more promising first party games. While Donkey Kong Bananza is on the way next month, there honestly isn’t a great deal slated for the immediate future.

And that’s not even to mention the many smaller problems. Some users are already complaining about the system’s ergonomics due to its weight and size in handheld mode, and while I haven’t encountered this issue yet, it may be a dealbreaker for some. Beyond this, an annoyance carried over from the Switch is that instead of being able to purchase emulated classics directly, like you could through the Wii’s Virtual Console, you instead need to pay a monthly subscription—just let me give you 15 bucks or whatever to play F-Zero GX! You also need this subscription for not only online play but also for voice chat with friends.

Top to bottom, the Nintendo Switch 2 is a luxury console: although it offers noticeable frame rate and graphical improvements in a hybrid package, it’s very expensive and doesn’t have much exclusive software to justify its hefty price tag.

Perhaps most deflating, though, is that it lacks that classic Nintendo spark, where an out-there idea spins into something unexpected and new. What if your handheld was a weird clamshell thing with a touchscreen? What if a television remote with motion controls led to a veritable craze? What if we had not one but two systems that attempted 3D? What if a console was also a handheld? Sure, not all of Nintendo’s ideas were this innovative or were winners, and maybe the Switch is legitimately such a fundamentally sound premise that there’s little reason for Nintendo to make anything else. But even if the company wouldn’t be able to top the Switch’s utility with a new concept, it’s hard not to be a bit melancholy about all those wacky futures we won’t see.

It’s no secret that as the big budget game industry flounders, large publishers are increasingly couching their massive investments in safe bets. But if even Nintendo has gone from creating weird, gimmicky, revolutionary, and sometimes disastrous consoles to pumping out a system so safe that it shares the name of its predecessor with a number affixed to the end, then you know the industry has fundamentally changed, maybe for good. Let’s hope that the company still has some game design magic left to help justify this expensive upgrade; I’d be surprised if they don’t, but until that’s certain, the Nintendo Switch 2 is hard to recommend.

Elijah Gonzalez is the assistant Games and TV Editor for Paste Magazine. In addition to playing and watching the latest on the small screen, he also loves film, creating large lists of media he’ll probably never actually get to, and dreaming of the day he finally gets through all the Like a Dragon games. You can follow him on Bluesky @elijahgonzalez.bsky.social.

For Better And Worse, The Nintendo Switch 2 Is a Safe Bet