Nintendo Switch 2

Hands on: All of that, and yet I'm two days in and I'm still very excited. A new Nintendo console, with a bunch of games I already love, and a bunch of little things that may change the way I play and connect with old friends. And the promise, of course, of new things to come.

Hands on: Now that I’ve had a Nintendo Switch 2 in my hands for a few days, I can say pretty confidently that this feels a lot like a Switch. You know, only more. The differences between console generations have become increasingly blurry over the last few years, and Nintendo’s latest device is the blurriest yet. It really is just a bigger, more powerful Switch. It’s not a radical update to Nintendo’s portable console — but it is a pleasant one.

Hands on: The Switch 2 needs to lean hard into that, I think. But it's also got a lot of promise. I just have to see how much it feels like a Nintendo console versus like a Steam Deck, and what taking it on the road next week will feel like.

Hands on: I suspect this could be more of an issue on Nintendo’s end, with millions of people picking up a Switch 2 at once, the company’s servers must be getting slammed pretty hard. Or at least, I’m hoping this is the case, because so far, download speeds have felt near dial-up levels of slowness.

Hands on: We’re already really enjoying our time with the Switch 2 outside of a few annoying shortcomings and design choices that haven’t yet won us over. Calling it just a bigger, stronger Switch might sound boring, but in practice, it totally rocks.

For now, suffice it to say that Switch 2 upgrades make a lot of the less performant Switch games much more bearable. This can be especially true for late-era Switch software that pushed the old hardware to its limits; after seeing Tears of the Kingdom running at a silky smooth 60 fps on the Switch 2, it will be hard to go back to playing the original version ever again.

Hands on: After all of that, I’m extremely familiar with Nintendo’s original hybrid system, and while I truly love that console, I’m also very aware of its shortcomings, from performance woes to joystick drift. Because the Switch 2 feels like more of an iterative successor that doesn’t set out to flip the table on what Nintendo was already doing, I am going to be taking an eye toward those longstanding issues and how well they have been addressed (although, for something like drift, we likely won’t have a clear answer for many months to come).

Hands on: Eight years after the launch of the first-generation Nintendo Switch, the concept remains almost unchanged; the Switch 2 has mainly become larger and more powerful. Nintendo has nevertheless tweaked many aspects of the hardware.