Nintendo Switch 2 first hands-on: more of the same is pretty brilliant when you’re following up one of the best consoles of all time

Nintendo is a company that has made reinventing the wheel into no big deal. For the house of Mario, overhaul is simply habitual – and in many ways, that dedication to rejuvenation and bringing a constant stream of the new has been the company’s secret sauce. That reinvention gave us the Switch’s unique form factor, and the Wii Remote. But, let’s be fair – it also gave us the WiiU. Those greater leaps forward carry a greater risk of a fall.

The Nintendo Switch 2 is different. Nintendo might be exceedingly careful with its words and make plain that the Switch 2 is somehow ‘more’, but let’s strip away the polished veneer of marketing speak and say the quiet part out loud: the Switch 2 is a gently iterative upgrade to the Nintendo Switch. At a first hands-on, there is no loud ‘wow moment’ revelation about the hardware. Instead, I’m treated to a smorgasbord of minor surprises that add up to a greater whole. To deploy the cliche, the Switch 2 feels like more than the sum of its parts.

Sometimes, it’s okay to be iterative. The Switch 2 is iterative in the exact way that the Super Nintendo was iterative – and that’s one of the best consoles of all time.

Let’s talk about the hardware itself. I don’t know what to say, really, other than to get real reductive and say that it is nicer. It’s sturdier in the hands. Joy-cons now attach with powerful magnets, which means that weirdly cheap-feeling loose feeling of the joy-cons on rails is gone. The joy-cons are slightly larger, leading to a better feel in the hand. It generally just feels like a more high-end product – but perhaps more than that, it feels like Nintendo is comfortable with what they’re making here to a level that has a positive impact on the hardware’s presence in the hand.

The Switch 2 hides new tricks, of course. A lot of stuff is simply improved – HD Rumble is better, the machine is more powerful, the screen is nicer (though painfully, still an LCD). New gimmicks are, by Nintendo’s standards, relatively few and far between. But where they are, they’re screamers. In a good way.

A favorite of mine is the ability to use joy-cons as a mouse device. On paper, in a trailer, this looks like that sort of vague gimmick that Nintendo will use a few times to great effect and then abandon. But in practice, no – this is clearly something more. Its use in cute mini-games in the ‘Welcome Tour’ delights – but the real test comes in Metroid Prime 4.

Playing a Metroid game at 120 frames per second with mouselook really feels illegal, and yet here it is – it’s real, on real hardware, and executed with a genius flourish. In Prime, mouse controls are constantly available – all you need to do is place the right joy-con into the mouse position, while the other continues to handle your movement. This means you can flick back and forth between traditional controls and mouselook instantly, with no menu navigation or settings flips. I integrated this into how I was playing the game proper – I’d hold the joy-cons more traditionally when scanning stuff and solving puzzles, but whenever combat got intense I’d slip into mouselook mode.

It’s a brilliant, clever addition. Metroid is one demo, but Nintendo has other implementations, and so do third parties – including full-on mouse pointer implementation in the Switch 2 version of Civilization 7. That makes that instantly the best console version of that game, by the way – chalk up a win there.

And of course I mentioned 120fps – the signifier of the power of this hardware. It is more powerful. Looking at higher-end games running on it, games we’re used to playing on PS5 and Xbox Series X, one can see why Nintendo has secured so many ports with ease. The brilliant Split Fiction looks great by the standards of a piece of portable hardcore. Hogwarts and Cyberpunk likewise. Though problems already rear their head here and there. Cyberpunk runs pretty damn well in docked mode, on a telly – but in handheld, I was taken aback: as presented at this hands-on, that is frankly not a version of the game I’d recommend – even if the docked version is. I was sort of surprised they were showing it in handheld at all, such was its performance in Dogtown, the heavy-load DLC area of the game which skipped last-gen hardware due to its heft. We saw all these sorts of caveats and balances with Switch – and it’s clear they will persist on Switch 2.

Over on Nintendo’s side, for their part, there seems to be a relishing in the power. Mario Kart is bigger and more expansive than ever, though it does admittedly look much the same. Donkey Kong Bananza both looks and feels like a suped-up Super Mario Odyssey, with the structure of solving many small puzzles to rapidly gather many bananas rather than explicit ‘stages’ to complete. It’s good looking, and the core mechanic of smashing everything up and deforming terrain appears to be a minor technological flex, even if this sort of tech appeared in Red Faction generations ago. Call this one Red Faction Gorilla. Geddit?

I’m going to write more about the specific games in the coming days, as I spent four-plus hours experiencing as many of them as I could. But the long and the short of it is… well, you know that meme of that cover of the book titled ‘Identifying Wood’? In it, a bearded bloke is looking through an eyepiece, closely examining what is obviously, clearly wood. Well, playing the Switch 2 for the first time… yep, that’s a Nintendo Switch. Just better.

I get the impression that Nintendo might be vaguely nervous about this. I can see why. Here’s a relatively samey machine, with some relatively samey games – Mario Kart and Metroid are known quantities, and though there hasn’t been a proper 3D Donkey Kong for over a quarter century, playing it I quickly drew parallels to Odyssey. A feeling of the familiar, and of the safe, pervades. If I’m drawing a comparison in Nintendo’s hardware history, I’m thinking about the jump from the Game Boy Color to the Game Boy Advance. It’s iterative, and mostly about things like the display and processing power rather than changing the way you play games forevermore. But that’s okay.

The Nintendo Switch is one of the best consoles ever made. But it’s also creaking and ancient technologically, and flawed, if softly, in its execution. The Switch 2 is less that difficult second album and more like that triumphant extended edition victory lap – but with enough extra power to justify the generational leap. As always, the ultimate barometer will be in software – but as a piece of hardware, I’m already on board.