This past weekend, on Sunday afternoon, I took a trip into London to go hands on with the Nintendo Switch 2 after receiving an invite as part of a randomised raffle earlier in the year.
Over the course of four hours I went hands on with the system in both docked and handheld modes, at 4K 60FPS and 1080P 120FPS, across a number of different titles making use of mouse mode, motion, camera gameplay, and more traditional controls.
I’m going to dig into my in depth thoughts in a moment, but here’s my overall take away upfront. The Switch 2 sure does feel like a more premium Switch. From build quality, to game performance, everything feels like a noticeable step forward for a form factor of device that I was already a big fan of. However, more than that, the Switch 2 feels like it crosses an important performance threshold. Where the Switch 1 saw ports of Doom 2016 and The Witcher 3 a few years post release with significant cuts required to get them to run, the Switch 2 feels like right out the gate it’s making fewer compromises to run more ambitious third party games.
Sure something like Cyberpunk 2077 would look better on your PS5 Pro, but the fact that I’d struggle in a randomised trial to tell if I was being shown the Xbox Series S or Switch 2 port of games like Cyberpunk or Street Fighter 6 does signal that the compromises being made to get ambitious ports running portably are shrinking considerably with this new generation.
Let’s start with impressions on the overall hardware. For reference, most of my time playing in handheld mode came with the system tethered to a heavy cable, with the Joy-Con 2 controllers bolted firmly in place. Impressions of the screen and portable performance have this caveat, but impressions of system feel, weight, and controller connectivity are based on time with a powered off dummy unit I was not able to film.
As a first impression, the Switch 2 feels very similar in weight to the Switch 1. The system is definitely wider and taller, but maintains the same thickness as its predecessor, and feels around the same weight.
While I had been dubious about the move back to an LCD screen after a couple of years with the Switch OLED, in practice I really did not care about that step backward when the system was actually in my hands. Yes, largely black loading screens aren’t quite as truly inky black as they would be on an OLED device, but everything else about the Switch 2 screen feels like a notable step up. The 1080P resolution is considerably more crisp, even at a larger overall size. The colour reproduction is great, and the system stood up well to bright light without suffering glare issues. The screen was viewable from a wide range of viewing angles, and that 120FPS display really does feel special when you’re playing supported software.
My most memorable experience with the handheld screen during the day was definitely right at the start, getting to play Grand Prix races at 1080P and 120FPS in portable mode in Mario Kart World. I know not every game’s going to run this well on the system, but having a launch day game that can take advantage of that high refresh rate really does help the handheld feel a lot more premium on first impression than something like a Steam Deck. Because the screen is Variable Refresh Rate I couldn’t tell if it was truly hitting 120FPS perfectly, with VRR able to hide small dips, but to a casual eye it felt rock solid. The gameplay was so fluid, with every little emote, explosion, comic book word splat and spinning trick feeling impossibly polished.
As much as I love the Switch 1, I can acknowledge that, when in handheld mode, the Joy-Cons don’t feel the most secure in their rails that they possibly could. With the Switch 2, that slight amount of wiggle and flex is gone. It was incredibly easy to forget that the Switch 2 Joy-Cons could be detached from the system while in handheld mode, everything just feels like one polished, complete, stable unit.
So, let’s talk a little bitabout the magnets, and attaching the Joy-Con 2 controllers. The process of plugging in the new magnetic Joy-Cons is incredibly smooth, with magnets satisfyingly snapping the controllers into place in such a way that I do not see any way that someone might accidently cause damage by incorrectly inserting them. For all the concern people had back in January about the connector inside the Joy-Con rail getting bent or breaking, I feel confident that’s basically never going to happen in everyday use. You’d have to go out of your way to pry that connector, and even then it’s got deliberate wiggle movement built into it to protect it from immediate damage in such a situation.
Also, the Joy-Con can be placed in the rail upside down, back to front, or on the wrong rail entirely without issue. The rail grooves are symmetrical, so putting a controller in the wrong hole or oriented incorrectly isn’t going to damage them. They still magnet into place, they just don’t damage anything.
Perhaps the most counter intuitive part of the whole setup is that, while the magnets holding the new Joy-Con in place feel incredibly sturdy, giving the system a more solid feel compared to the rail system on the original Switch, removing the Joy-Con is really simple. The button on the back of the Joy-Con used to release the controller doesn’t require nearly as much pressure as I had expected, and the Joy-Con simply pops out from the top end first. It’s weirdly easy to disconnect with the button, but really hard to remove without using the release. It’s pretty magical, it feels too good to really make sense in a quick test experience. I don’t quite understand it right now.
In terms of discussing Mouse Mode for the Joy-Con 2, I think that Metroid Prime 4 might be the best game to talk about, which I played in docked mode at 1080P 120FPS.
Moving in and out of mouse mode when playing Metroid Prime 4 is super intuitive – Simply put your Joy-Con down on its side and you’re aiming with a mouse. Pick it back up, you’re playing with traditional controls again. No menus, just naturally swap between control schemes in real time with no confirmation delay.
Playing with a Sideways Joy-Con 2 as a mouse is initially a little disorienting. You know it’s a mouse, you’re using it to aim like a mouse in any PC First Person Shooter, but your thumb is naturally resting near an analogue stick, and you need to use your thumb to press some of the controller’s face buttons during play for things like jumping, and activating morph ball mode. It took me a little while to train myself out of trying to instinctively use the analogue stick with my thumb to turn my character, even though I was in mouse mode. The urge did pass by the end of my 15 minute demo session, but it took a little bit of getting used to. Recategorizing a controller as a mouse does fight a little against some of your more common mental wiring, or at least it did for me.
I was pleasantly surprised to see that the Metroid Prime 4 demo included support for increasing mouse sensitivity, and my goodness I was very surprised by how much sensitivity the mouse mode Joy-Con was capable of registering. In addition, I tested the Joy-Con mouse on my legs rather than the provided table and mouse pad, and had zero issues. My plain black cotton leggings registered mouse movement just as well as a dedicated table.
It is undeniably a little awkward holding a sideways Joy-Con in the centre of your hand, it’s going to take some getting used to and it isn’t going to be comfortable for every kind of player, but I was able to confirm thanks to trying out the dummy unit that was on show that the Switch 2 Joy-Cons do fit inside the 3D printed mouse grip peripheral that I recently showcased here on this channel, which should hopefully help to alleviate some of the discomfort of the thin grip required to make use of mouse mode during gameplay.
Ideally I do want to make a couple of last minute tweaks to that 3D printed grip, but it does work currently.
Metroid Prime 4’s really did convince me that I want to be playing this game when it launches on a 120FPS monitor, in mouse mode. As initially counter intuitive as the controls felt, before long I found myself using lock-on to target enemies, mouse mode to aim for headshots, dropping lock-on to quick turn with my mouse, picking the Joy-Con up when it was time to use my scan visor, then popping it right back down to rapid fire my blaster again. The demo’s boss fight, while a little bit of a damage sponge, was a great excuse to really get comfortable with the new control scheme, and I came away from my time very much sold on the experience.
Back to the Switch 2 hardware, the new Kickstand, while thinner than the solid kickstand seen on the Switch OLED, does feel incredibly sturdy in person. Despite the thin nature of the strip of metal, I feel confident that this will do the job as well as the OLED system’s kickstand, and is a world of improvement over the Gen 1 Switch kickstand without a doubt.
In terms of discussing the new Rumble advancements in the Joy-Con 2, the big game I want to talk about in some depth is Drag X Drive, a competitive 3V3 wheelchair basketball video game being published by Nintendo.
Players move around the arena by using two mouse mode Joy-Con controllers to push the two wheels on their wheelchair. Pushing just the left Joy-Con mouse forward turns you right, pulling your left hand back rotates you to the left, pushing both forward at once moves you forward, and both back moves you back. You can move one forward and one back to do a quick turn on the spot.
There are some basic button inputs, you can for example apply the brakes by hitting your trigger buttons or hit your bumpers to pass the ball to a teammate, but for the most part the controls are simply manoeuvre your wheelchair, then pick up your controller when you’ve got the ball and do a throwing motion to try and get the ball in the net to score points.
The game made great use of rumble, with the controllers producing a series of satisfying click style rumbles as you pushed the controllers forward, mimicking the clattering of turning gears as the wheels rotated in a hugely satisfying way.
The game is exhausting physically to play – While the control scheme to me was intuitive as a replication of real world manual wheelchair movement, playing this with mouse motions is going to be an accessibility barrier for some disabled players, and exhausting after a few rounds for everyone regardless.
I do hope we see an alternative control scheme offered for players with physical mobility disabilities who may wish to play, but I was glad to see the inclusion of accessibility features such as high contrast outlines on enemy team players, and a bright highlighted circle to show where the ball was when offscreen, and by colour coding which team had current possession.
I also really appreciate that the game doesn’t shy away from the contact nature of the real world inspiration sport, and the decision to have teams forfeit possession of the ball if after 14 seconds of possession they’ve not yet made an attempted shot at the net, keeping the ball moving and increasing opportunities for interception.
I was a little confused at the hands on event when on more than one occasion Nintendo representatives “corrected” people who referred to the game as wheelchair basketball, stating they’d been told to use the word “vehicle” rather than wheelchair when talking about the game. It’s a mildly baffling decision, and one that I hope we get some clarity from Nintendo on in the coming weeks. I doubt it’s born out of malice, but it does feel clunky. I wonder whether there was a licensing conflict with the official real world sport, or if there’s a regional term in Japan that I simply haven’t come across that’s at play.
With my opinions on the base hardware out of the way, the next game worth discussing is probably Mario Party Jamboree’s new Jamboree TV mode, which makes use of the Mouse Mode functionality of the Joy-Con 2 controllers, and the optional camera accessory which is what I’m going to focus on in this video.
In terms of core functionality, the new Switch 2 camera works pretty decently for Kinect style motion controlled minigames. An event like the Switch 2 Hands-On Experience is far from an ideal venue for this kind of camera setup game demo, with odd lighting and plenty of people in the background, but the camera did a great job picking out players, automatically green screening the background out from behind them, registering small movements accurately, and being high enough quality to get a giggle out of seeing yourself on the TV.
The main issue I had with the implementation in Mario Party Jamboree’s Bowser TV mode is that the camera seemingly isn’t built to handle players of wildly differing heights playing together, causing issues if you’ve got adults and children playing in a group together. The group before mine played with the camera set at a natural height for the adults to play, but that left a child in the group playing who was too short to reach the question mark block she was meant to be punching, even when she jumped up in the air. By comparison, for my group all three adults had to kneel on the floor to lower ourselves so that the child in the group could interact properly with game elements. This sort of lack of accounting for size differences is going to cause some issues that I can foresee with family game nights, and feels like something that should have been foreseen either with the camera or the game software, I’m not quite sure where the issue lies.
Having played four new mouse minigames and the camera controlled Bowser content, Mario Party Jamboree’s new content feels like it would honestly have been the ideal pack in title for the Switch 2, if it wasn’t DLC for an existing game and built around a peripheral not everyone has. None of it is going to hold attention as well as the base game of Mario Party does in my opinion, but it is a fun showcase for what the system does. It feels infinitely less clinical than Switch 2 Welcome Tour, the paid piece of edutainment that many others have pitched as making sense as a pack in title for the system.
Moving more broadly onto games, Mario Kart World’s new Knockout Mode was probably the star of the show for me, and the piece of content from the show floor that had me most eager to jump back into playing at launch in around 6 weeks. Essentially a Battle Royale mode, 24 players are dropped into a race, with checkpoints requiring you to be above a minimum race position at select intervals not to be kicked out.
If you survive the entire experience, it’s a 15-20 minute long single race across an ever changing set of environments where victory is never safe, and defeat is never certain. Any time you’re either suitably at the back of the pack, or just far enough back that you won’t meet the next threshold goal, the game throws high value items at you in order to help ensure that you’re able to potentially catch up. Things get painfully frantic in the stretch before a new checkpoint, with a single lucky item able to change your fate, or a single bad impact potentially ruinous. It’s fast, chaotic, and hugely addictive in a positive sense.
Donkey Kong: Bananza is the last game I’m likely to talk about in any great detail in this initial impressions video. You have big fists, you punch solid rock, gold flies everywhere, it’s pretty satisfying. Combat in particular felt great, with impacts punctuated by impact pauses that really help you to feel as the player like an Incredible Hulk style machine of destruction.
I have personal concerns about Bananza – the concern isn’t whether I’ll enjoy the game or not, but how much it’s going to eat away at my brain. Basically all of the in-game environment is destructible, and it’s really easy to punch a random wall, find a secret, and get the urge to start digging into the floor of the level looking for things hidden right below my feet. The obsessive collection goblin in me fears for my sanity.
You’re never going to destroy a level so badly you can’t progress, you can restore the level to its undestroyed state at any time. Additionally you can slam your hands on the floor to see silhouettes of nearby collectables, or sing music to be led to the next progression objective which will hopefully help, but I do genuinely have concerns I might get a little obsessed with this game, and without healthy exit ramps to gameplay I’ll have to determine if this is something I can have a healthy relationship with playing.
It was really cool to play in the moment though, I can’t deny that.
A lot of other things I played at the Switch 2 preview event were really cool, they were truly impressive, but not in ways that require any kind of depth to explain. Street Fighter 6 runs at a fluid 60FPS and looks better than its Series S counterpart, even if in part that’s due to a graphics bug on the entry level Xbox system. The Zelda remasters run at 60FPS and I think 1440P, now with no stutters in performance, and I’m excited to revisit Hyrule and have Zelda on my phone reading me tour guide information about the places I visit. Yakuza 0 now has English voice acting and looks great at 4K 60. Welcome Tour is interesting if you’re a nerd like me looking to make content, but very much without a clear audience of its own. Kirby and the Forgotten Land has new content and does look nice, and upscaled Gamecube games are pretty. Civilisation 7’s mouse controls are cool. Split Fiction runs well, and Elden Ring wasn’t there to try, as much as I really wanted to try it.
All the games on that rapid fire list were impressive, don’t get me wrong, but it was the first party titles that either went all in on 120FPS visuals or new mouse mode features that really caught my attention on the day. I do believe mouse mode is going to set this system apart in some really interesting ways, particularly when some 3rd party company creates a wireless mouse that the Switch 2 perceives as a Joy-Con, but is a little more comfortable to hold in your hand. I’m surprisingly hooked on Drag X Drive’s gameplay loop, and it’s really nice playing something like Mario Kart at a ridiculously high framerate and feeling like Nintendo’s, at least in one aspect, feeling technologically exciting to me for the first time in a while. My PS5 Pro can in theory do 120FPS gaming, but the Switch 2 is much more likely to get me to actually play games at this framerate thanks to having a built in screen that supports it.
The Switch 2 in many ways feels like a more polished and professional Switch – Big surprise, that’s basically what most of us were asking for it to be. The big surprises for me initially were how intuitive mouse mode felt for serious and fast paced shooters, how much I appreciate Nintendo’s push for 120FPS modes in first party games, and how little compromise it feels like has been needed to get the most demanding launch window ports onto the device. It feels at times like a portable Xbox Series S, until you start playing a first party title in handheld mode and realise Nintendo’s doing a spectacular job pulling unexpectedly next generation performance out of their modest little machine. Optimisation can go a long way, and playing Nintendo titles at 4K 60, or 1080 120, really does feel like for the first time in a while Nintendo is going to be able to keep pace with its console competition a little more reasonably.
Gosh, I want to be playing this thing at home already.