Nintendo Switch 2 Hands-on Preview – Worthy of a Wahoo!

Officially announced earlier this year, and with its full reveal only a month ago, the launch of the Nintendo Switch 2 is somehow only a few weeks away. Launching on June 5, the latest from the Mario crew has fans chomping at the bit, so much so that Nintendo is already projecting a strong year ahead, with strong pre-order results so far, and demand in some countries exceeding the expected supply.

Hype train aside, the Switch 2 comes with a caveat of being quite expensive at launch, around the $700 AUD mark, certainly not a low asking price during tough financial times for many. With the original Switch now past its 8th(!) birthday, it does feel like the exact right time for a sequel, however, even if it’s perhaps coming a little bit later than anticipated.

So, with the countdown firmly on, we had the chance to go hands-on with Nintendo’s newest at the Nintendo Switch 2 Experience event here in Melbourne, ahead of the general public. And after holding it in my hands and playing a range of upcoming games… well… I’m far more sold on its potential, overall. This feels like the console the original Switch was always meant to be.

The Switch 2 console itself instantly feels premium than its predecessor. The original Switch often copped criticism for feeling almost “toy-like” at times; while this was alleviated with the fancier, more expensive OLED version that came later, the following years of handheld PC iterations like the Steam Deck and ASUS ROG Ally, among others, have been the good kind of hefty (though, their prices are of course, in some cases, drastically more expensive).

Holding this new baby, it doesn’t feel as lightweight, and with my big hands, I mean that as a compliment. It’s also less flimsy; the simple act of taking the Joy-Con 2’s off and then magnetically clicking them back onto the machine is incredibly satisfying, and adding the wrist straps to them also just feels better. The screen is absolutely bigger and brighter; that additional 1.7 inches might not seem like much, but it’s an impressive piece of kit in person. While I didn’t have my OLED to compare side-by-side in this instance, it’s still a gorgeous screen, and everything I experienced in handheld mode ran smoothly and was visually impressive.

Metroid Prime 4: Beyond was predictably awesome, too, but the surprise of the day for me came from the Joy-Con 2’s functionality in easily becoming a mouse. This was our first title that we came across using this feature, and I was blown away by how simple and satisfying it is in practice. For a shooter like Metroid Prime 4, mouse mode adds extra precision when aiming (although there is still target locking to help, if needed). Not only that, but some shooting puzzles within the demo we tried also benefited from the use of the mouse mode. Impressively, you can just flip between them at your will, moving from mouse to traditional controller style whenever you want, with no pause. I don’t know why I thought this would be a setting-changing thing, but Nintendo have made it utterly seamless here, and it’s a thrill to muck around with.

Additionally, we played an intense match of Drag x Drive, a game that is doing awesome things for wheelchair-user representation, having you use both Joy-Con 2’s mouse functionality to represent the idea of pulling your wheels backwards to get momentum. Once through the tutorial and into a match, it got quite competitive quickly. I’m happy to say I was the top scorer, winning the game for our team of 3, but my arms were already feeling a bit worn out from just the 10 minutes or so spent playing it. If you’re worried about table space or access, you can use mouse mode on your legs, but this felt awkward and less natural in the moment. What Drag x Drive is lacking more than anything is the personality of its contemporaries (e.g. Rocket League), but I’m hoping there’s more of that still to come in a deeper dive.

Super Mario Party Jamboree – Nintendo Switch 2 Edition + Jamboree TV showed another use case for the mouse being an innovative and exciting way to play with the Switch 2. We tried a few mini games, all mouse-focused, and they captured the insanity of Mario Party we’ve come to love, with some neat ideas. Shell Hockey is a natural fit, a version of air hockey with Koopa shells that gets hectic when multiple Koopas hit the table at once. Another had us sorting letters into folders on a computer by frantically dragging and dropping, something that gave fellow Checkpointer Omi and me serious corporate flashbacks (derogatory), as Toad sits at the PC, lamenting the idea of sorting his inbox.

Other games had us delicately stacking blocks to make a tall structure, or carefully maneuvering Toad through an electric maze without touching the sides; they each show various layers of precision and focus, and were great showcases of mouse mode. The Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour makes another good case for it, with simple examples like avoiding meteors as a little spaceship, or another that has you feeling the vibrations to find the sweet spot, or even identifying whether a framerate of a bouncing ball is 30, 60 or 120 fps (one for the real nerds). I’m still not sure it’s worth the $15 price tag, but it further proves that Nintendo are thinking about the Joy-Con 2 and what it’s capable of across all functions, and I hope developers take advantage of the unique tech to bring some cool ideas to life.

Reports of Zelda, both Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, playing like new games also feels justified. Experiencing Breath of the Wild in particular, with a buttery smooth framerate and looking off into the distance at the gigantic map, is exhilarating, and breathes new life into the 8-year-old Switch launch title. Tears of the Kingdom is newer, but still receives similar benefits; they look wonderful, and are now must-play all-timer video games without the previous asterisk of ageing Switch hardware holding them back.

I also love that I was able to play Cyberpunk 2077 on the Switch 2, but that does still come with the asterisk. While it’s impressive to see such a beast of a game on a Nintendo console at all, it did suffer from some framerate stuttering and pop-in, along with some lower-quality textures, particularly when traversing the large open world in a vehicle. Closer-range firefights and indoor environments fared better; I think this is still a good excuse to play through CD Projekt RED’s sci-fi epic, but it’s possible that the Switch 2 version of this game, and others, will require further optimising to really reach their full potential.

The Nintendo Switch 2 Camera, while sleeker and smaller in person to the point where it could subtly sit on anybody’s TV cabinet without looking too out of place, so far, seems to be more of a novelty than anything else. I can see the online social aspect being neat, but all we were able to test here was a couple of Super Mario Party Jamboree minigames that utilised it. Granted, it offered fun in the same way that the EyeToy offered fun back in the day on the PS2, with its campy and cringey factors of seeing you and your friends on the screen in silly environments (in this case, in the crowd of a Bowser concert, cheering, dancing, and dabbing like fools).

The games themselves – balancing objects on your head or hitting a question block to get coins – feel overly simple, though I was impressed with the width of the camera view, and the quality of seeing ourselves on the big screen planted in the Bowser-fest, even if we were in a super-controlled environment at the Experience that doesn’t reflect the reality of our living rooms. The jury is still out on this one, but it could be a decent enough inclusion if you don’t mind dropping the extra 70 bucks.

After just a few hours of hands-on time with the Switch 2, I’ve left with a lot more confidence about the console as a whole. There’s already some clear stand-outs in terms of software to look forward to, and we’ll have more detailed previews of some of the games mentioned above, specifically Mario Kart World, Donkey Kong Bananza and Metroid Prime 4: Beyond in the coming days.

There’s still a lot more testing to do to see if Nintendo’s newest machine will truly take the world by storm as its original has – large shoes to fill, given its status as the third, soon to be second, best-selling gaming console of all time. As far as first impressions go, the Nintendo Switch 2 is an essential upgrade to ageing hardware, with a few new tricks up its sleeve to continue delivering that sweet, undeniable Nintendo Magic.

Nintendo Switch 2 is available for pre-order now, releasing on June 5th.