Seven things we learned from a weekend with the Nintendo Switch 2

The Nintendo Switch 2 has been hyped and anticipated in equal measure. With Nintendo not making pre-release review copies available, this is what the first weekend with the console was like. Tl;dr, it was fun.

1. Mario Kart World is a blast

Centring around Mario Kart World as a launch game was thought by some to be a bit of a risky strategy. However, that would be to ignore the fact that Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is the best selling Switch game of them all, selling over twice the number of copies as The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild at 68.2 million. It is a phenomenally popular series, and the good news is that MKW is superb when it is adding more of the same. The new tracks throw up some serious challenges, the way jumping/hopping has been added onto drift challenges your timing and muscle memory enough to be definitely disruptive, and the roving, roiling messy peloton of 24 racers is great fun, if a bit of a turnoff for the more purist Mario racers out there. 

The open world aspects? I’m less convinced. Driving between the tracks as part of a contest is an excellent innovation — Knockout Tour is particularly good for that — and the world is busy, interactive, and looks wonderful in that trademark Nintendo-y cartoonish way. I’m just not convinced yet that I want to just drive around it and explore, and that’s from someone who’s more than happy to boot up Zelda for a bit and just tramp around Hyrule’s geography for an hour. 

Three things in life are certain though: death, taxes, and that this game will get a DLC. We’ll see how it evolves.

2. Let’s talk about pricing

One of the big downsides to MKW is, of course, that it’s a long way from being cheap. $80 is a lot of money for a title, and about $10 in advance of where you would expect to find a triple-A PS5 game; that’s a price normally reserved for the deluxe editions. Yes, GTA VI will probably cost that much or more when it launches, but y’know, that’s GTA VI. But Switch 2 games are set to be expensive. Next month’s Donkey Kong Bananza will be $70, Super Mario Party Jamboree will be $80, and August’s Kirby and the Forgotten Land will be $80 too. Hell, even the Welcome Tour cost $10.

Partly this is inflation, of course. There was much angst about the Switch 2’s $450 launch price, especially compared to the $300 price of the original Switch. But if you plug the numbers into an inflation tracker and allow for eight years you end up at $390 in the US, so the markup’s possibly not quite as bad as it looks. But still, it’s a higher-end price than people tend to associate with Nintendo so they are going to reasonably expect a higher-end experience.

The long and the short? Nintendo is going to have to work on things such as downloadable previews and let people try before they buy.

3. A glow-up for original Switch titles

Nintendo has overhauled a tonne of Switch games for the Switch 2. These range from paid updates such as the ones for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, through titles with free updates, to those where they’ve just made a few adjustments to make things look better.

The results can be spectacular. Ars Technica has some screen capture equipment that I don’t have in the house, and its side by side comparison of a scene from Tears of the Kingdom on the docked Switch 1 and 2 shows all the benefits that the move to 4K, improved detail, and higher frame rates can bring and mirrors what I’m seeing on my screen. 

$9.99 for the upgraded edition? Frankly, shut up and take my money, and that’s even before we get to the blissfully faster load times.

4. Performance issues a thing of the past

Given that this is the first wave of Switch 2 titles we’re seeing, the standard of performance is impressive. At the heart of the Switch 2 is a custom NVIDIA processor featuring an Nvidia GPU with dedicated RT Cores and Tensor Cores for impressive visuals and AI-driven enhancements.

Nvidia explains that the new RT Cores bring real-time ray tracing, delivering lifelike lighting, reflections and shadows for more immersive worlds. Tensor Cores, meanwhile, power AI-driven features like Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS), boosting resolution for sharper details without sacrificing image quality.

The company claims that all this provides 10x the graphics performance of the Nintendo Switch. It’s not PS5 level performance, the compromises needed to make it a handheld at this price point were never going to allow that, but it is fairly beefy compared to how underpowered Nintendo machines have been in the past: think something like a PS4 Pro in your hand.

That means it can run something like launch title Cyberpunk 2077 at a solid 40 fps which, when it comes to Nintendo, is equivalent to finding a unicorn has decided to use your garden shed as a stable and moved in with the family. 

5. It's heavy people…

It has a bigger screen and bigger controllers, so it stands to reason that the Switch 2 is also bigger and heavier than its predecessor. That could be a problem for some people. The original weighed 0.88 lbs / 0.4 kg, while the new console is 1.18 lbs / 0.54 kg, feeling appreciably heavier in the hand. It doesn’t help that the Switch tends to a narrower form factor than, say, a Steam Deck, meaning that that weight is spread over a smaller area. During long gaming sessions its easy to see this getting awkward.

6. A curate’s egg of controllers

The Joy-Cons are bigger, feel heftier, and seem more suited to adult hands than those on the original model, and the magnet system works really well with a good, solid-feeling lock. That said, we moved to Pro Controllers not long after getting the original Switch in this household and have never looked back. These will get upgraded to the new ones too at some point, partly for the mappable back buttons, partly for the HD Rumble 2, partly to hedge against joystick drift. Yes, sadly Nintendo hasn’t taken the opportunity to implement Hall effect sensors on the Joy-Con or Pro Controller joysticks, so at some point the dreaded joystick drift is going to return to haunt you, even unto this second generation.

One of the big innovations with the new Joy-Cons is, of course, that they can be used as mice. This is a good idea but they’re not quite there yet. They’re pleasingly precise, seem to work well on a range of surfaces and aren’t so finicky that you need a dedicated mousemat to support their use, but on the other hand — literally — they’re too narrow for comfort in any longterm gaming scenarios. There's already a plethora of third party mouse holders available like the ones below, though, leading you to question why Nintendo never made its own.

7. Cats really like the box

All boxes are popular with cats, but it seems there's something about this one in particular. Another upgrade win!