Full disclosure; I’m definitely a Nintendo kid. I grew up with a Wii, staunchly held on to the Wii U as my only console of that whole generation, and whiled countless hours away on my DS/3DS during my family’s many road trips. I’ve really enjoyed playing indie games, old classics, and first-party Nintendo games on my Switch, but anyone could tell it needed an upgrade by this point. When a game like Mario and Luigi: Brothership has framerate issues, something’s up. Third-party support is becoming increasingly demanding, and the Switch’s hardware just wasn’t looking “good enough” anymore. In comes the Switch 2 reveal trailer: a bigger screen with 120 hz and HDR support, improved Joy-Cons, quality-of-life fixes like an improved kickstand and a top charging port (finally), and enough power to run a game like Elden Ring? All that combined with some extremely promising title reveals like Donkey Kong Bananza, Mario Kart World, and Kirby Air Riders, and they had me sold… but then the price was revealed. As much as I wanted a straight upgrade for my Switch, it wasn’t gonna come cheap.
Anyways, let’s start with the physical side of things. Everything I listed about the hardware before is here, and it all feels good to have. The dock, too, has seen improvements. Though I don’t exactly prefer the back snapping off and on instead of flipping out like the old one, it now has a built-in LAN port for better online connections. A headphone jack complements the topside USB port. As someone who stubbornly refuses to go wireless with their earbuds, I’m very happy the headphone jack is still there. These improvements can seem small, especially to less serious players, but they add up to make the console feel roundly better to use.
The new Joy-Cons snap onto the side of the console magnetically instead of sliding in, which makes it a little easier to attach or detach them from whatever angle. The sticks and buttons feel a little better, too. Features like HD rumble and gyro controls remain as good as they ever were. The right Joy-Con can now even be used like a mouse. It’s a cool idea, but there’s not much to try with it right now (even I won’t pay ten dollars for Nintendo’s tech demo which should have come with the console). The mouse controls work pretty well, but the simple fact is that having the right Joy-Con on its side is not ergonomic in any sense of the word. It’s a thin piece of hardware to be sliding around like a mouse, no matter how you hold it. I’m sure I’ll have more to say on it once Metroid Prime 4: Echoes comes out; after all, mouse has been the best for shooters for a long time.
I also got myself a new Switch 2 Pro Controller with the console. I already loved the original Switch Pro Controller, and this new one - much like the console - is like that, but better. The sticks feel absolutely amazing on this thing; they’re genuinely the smoothest sticks on any controller I’ve used. The plus and minus buttons are raised up higher now, making them easier to hit without thinking and reducing the chances of pressing home or the screenshot button by mistake. The new back buttons - GL and GR - are also pretty nice to have as a standard feature. They can be remapped to any other button, but are mapped to themselves by default. Maybe some games will provide unique inputs for these buttons, but for now, that mostly means they’re unmapped by default. This is convenient for me, since I tend to accidentally press back buttons if I squeeze the controller too hard at any point. As someone who plays a lot of tough, retro 2D platformers on Switch, a good d-pad is a must. The new d-pad feels a little better - I had much fewer misinputs during a Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon 2 playthrough than usual - but I was hoping for a more noticeable improvement. It’s still a little mushy, and pressing up or down can carry some left or right inputs with it if you’re not careful (but far, far less frequently than the old one would).
Now for the big stuff; performance. Aside from some more nice quality-of-life stuff, like the ability to quickly send screenshots and clips to the Switch phone app, games should look a lot better on this system going forward. The Switch 2’s attempts to add HDR in incompatible games is reportedly poor, but you can thankfully limit it to only using HDR in compatible titles. That’s gonna be my final two cents on HDR, since I can’t tweak it to look good on or off of this system. I’m sure it works for some people. With my experience on PC, I can attest that 120fps capability is going to look great. The only problem is that hardly anything supports it right now. I haven’t sprung for the The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom upgrades that enable it - pretty lame of the Big N to charge for that, by the way - so at the moment I can’t play anything on this system at 120.
The console is definitely less likely to get overwhelmed than the Switch 1, though. Nintendo can’t exactly put a paywall on better processing power. The best stress test I could think of was Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity, a busy game whose visual style and large number of entities to keep track of frequently led to slideshow framerates. I had a good clip of the game running terribly on my Switch 1 lying around, and I’ve recorded a similar clip on Switch 2 that should demonstrate just how much more reliable you can expect the new controls to be. These clips have spoilers for Age of Calamity, by the way.
There’s the Switch 1 footage. Just the two characters and the boss on screen and the game can’t handle the arrow rain.
Now on Switch 2. Even more projectile spam, more entities on screen, fog to render, and it’s still running better. I’m not trying to give Nintendo the gold medal for outdoing their eight-year-old hardware that was already behind industry standards when it came out; this is just to show that, even if your old games aren’t getting a lot of the specific enhancements that come with the upgrade packs, you will very likely be benefiting from the system’s improved specs. Choppy framerates was the number-one issue with the Switch for a lot of people, and getting this system definitely helps with that. Reportedly, the Switch 2 version of Street Fighter 6 has pretty low input lag and stable performance. Combine that with its crossplay-compatible rollback netcode, and I’d certainly say the hardware on Switch 2 is up to the task on some surprisingly powerful games right now.
A few more miscellaneous thoughts before I wrap stuff up. Transferring data from the original Switch was baked right into the first-time setup process, and it was very easy. Nintendo definitely knows a lot of people are hopping on with this just to have a better version of the console they already like; to that end, it works pretty well. I won’t be commenting on the game chat features since I don’t currently know anyone else with one of these systems. That said, though, there is very little that’s even been advertised about game chat that makes me think I’d ever want to use it over Discord.
I also don’t have a Nintendo Switch Online subscription right now, but I’m not exactly hearing great things about online lobby support in Mario Kart World. I’m not on a Nintendo console for peerless online play, and I doubt anyone else is either. Sure, Capcom figured out good networking on this thing with Street Fighter 6, but Nintendo has always been behind the curve on online multiplayer for their own titles. If they knew what was good for ‘em, they’d be releasing an upgrade pack for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate that improves the netcode a ton. That’s just free money on the table right there… even if just about any other company would patch something like that in for free.
All in all, if you were worried that Switch 2 wouldn’t feel like an improvement, I’d put that fear to rest. I’m looking forward to playing all the stuff I already liked on a much more capable piece of hardware. However, the question is really whether it’s 450 dollars worth of improvement. At the moment, it kind of depends. For Nintendo fans who get a lot of use out of their Switches and are looking forward to the upcoming first-party titles, I say it’s worth picking one up when you feel like it. However, if you’re not sure how many of Nintendo’s new titles you’ll be enjoying or how often you’ll even use a Switch 2 to begin with, I would definitely hold off for now. Outside of Mario Kart World, there’s not much to get on this system you can’t get on the original Switch or another gaming platform. This console’s value is going to go up a lot once it gets more to play on it. Overall, I’d say it’s worth holding off on Switch 2 until it has something you really want. This isn’t something you need to have in your hands as soon as possible, regardless of the hype.