I thought the Switch 2 couldn't surprise me anymore. I was wrong
When I first went hands-on with the Nintendo Switch 2 in April, I thought I had seen everything the console could show me. I spent an entire day playing it, testing close to a dozen games that put every feature to the test. I walked away from that thinking that Nintendo didn't have many more cards to play. It's a more powerful Switch; what else is there to know?
Quite a bit, as it turns out. Ahead of the console's June 5 launch, I spent another full day with the Nintendo Switch 2. While I didn't have a buffet of games to test this time, I did get a fuller picture of the hardware itself. I discovered several unrevealed nuances in that time, all of which made it clear that this isn't just a Switch with a better chip. You may be more surprised than you're expecting come launch day.
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New settings
For this demo session, Nintendo put an emphasis on its two first-party launch games. I played 45 minutes of Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour before getting a sweeping Mario Kart World overview across several hours. The juicy part, though, is that I was given largely unrestricted access to the hardware. That meant I was free to hop into the setting menu, which has been a bit of a mystery until now. That's where I began to find the Switch 2's secrets.
For instance, players will now have the ability to create a shortcut for button remapping. Rather than digging through a menu to find it, players can make it so that a mapping option appears on the pop-out menu that comes up when holding the home button. Back buttons on compatible controllers can be remapped on the fly here too. Even more handy? There's now a single menu option that swaps the A and B buttons at a system level. Say goodbye to hitting cancel when you meant to confirm. Perhaps most surprising is the fact that Mii creation somehow still lives on here, keeping the Wii era alive.
For the Joy-Con 2's mouse feature, players can pick between three sensitivity settings. I was also surprised to see that I could use the mouse to control the system's menus as if I was using a desktop computer. When using two Joy-cons as mice, both can move my cursor. (I also finally got a chance to test Nintendo's claim that the mice even work on pants, and I can confirm that they are very jeans-friendly.)
There's a bigger emphasis on accessibility this time around too, as that gets its own dedicated settings menu. There, players can make menu text larger, change menu colors, and more. Best of all, the Switch 2 now has a text-to-speech option that will act as a screen reader in menus. Players can adjust the speed and tone of the voice.
While I found a lot of new features in menus, I learned about even more through Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour. The interactive system guide is full of headline-making details that make the system stand out. For instance, I learned that the new HD Rumble is able to buzz so precisely that it can simulate sounds. One Welcome Tour demo had my controller making the sounds of a 1-Up Mushroom and Coin sound from a Mario game.
I also learned that the Switch 2 uses the same exact speakers as the Switch OLED. However, they're housed in a different box and placed diagonally, allowing the console to produce louder, clearer sound from the same speakers. Though it's still absurd that Welcome Tour isn't a free pack-in, the wealth of nitty gritty detail it contains will be genuinely valuable to Nintendo's techiest fans.
And I won't lie: The gamified way that's all presented is surprisingly entertaining too. I very much got into its mouse-controlled minigames, like one that had me mini golfing and another that had me clicking on targets to break them as fast as possible. There's a satisfying meta progression system on top of that too, which has players interacting with every piece of the console to gain stamps that open access to new exploitable areas. I went inside a Joy-con and got to poke around its digitized internals.
Enter GameChat
The biggest test of all came when I finally got to try GameChat extensively. The new feature essentially puts Zoom inside of the system, allowing players to chat using webcams and even superimpose themselves onto their screen-shared game footage. I've been a skeptic of the feature since it was announced due to the fact that shared gameplay looked like it was outputting at 10 frames per second.
That part is still mortifyingly true, but the social feature has some great tricks up its sleeve. In my demo, I played The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventure with members of the press in other rooms. Each of us was using Nintendo's own camera to capture our faces and place it over game footage. I set a transparency mode to cut out the background behind me, which fully kept my face in one piece and even captured the demoist setting next to me too. I could only place myself in the bottom right corner of my window, though I could adjust the zoom to change how big I appeared.
The interface itself is very painless to use. I got an invite to join a party, pressed the C-button, clicked join, and I was in. I had full control over my game until I pressed the C-button again and opened a quick menu where I could mute my mic, toggle my camera on or off, and activate screen sharing. I could also access additional settings here that let me tweak the layout of the screen. I could make video chat windows smaller or get rid of them all together if I wanted. As an extra bonus, I can click on another player's screen to open another small menu that takes me to their profile, lets me report them, or even takes me straight to the eShop page for whatever game they're playing.
What's even more impressive is that GameChat has its own set of accessibility options, including a speech-to-text feature. When activated, the gameplay screen moves to the left and a new widget slots into the right side. This turns anything that players say over the microphone into text live with very little delay, and even splits it up by the speaker. It works shockingly well. It picked up just about everything that was said during the session down to the 'ums,' with only a few dropped words or spacing errors. Conversely, there's a text-to-speech option too, which will allow someone to plug in a keyboard, type, and have that read out loud by a digital voice. I didn't get to see that in action, but I did see settings options that would allow me to connect a keyboard. It's a genuinely impressive communication tool that sets the Switch 2 apart from any other console currently available.
While I enjoyed seeing and hearing other players during Four Swords, the more fun use case for camera integration came during my Mario Kart World demo. For one chunk of my session, Nintendo placed four members of the press in a room with one camera. We were shown the feed on screen and prompted to place a circle on our faces. Once I jumped into a race, I could see my opponent's faces in a bubble above their car – or, I should say, they saw my face as they ate my grits. I milked the feature during a successful grand prix win, taunting everyone behind me and tossing in an obscene gesture or two (once again, I'll emphasize that handy report button).
It's a cute little feature that makes games a little more personal. For one, I always know who's a human and who's a bot in Mario Kart's 24-player races. When someone nails me with an item in battle mode, their face pops up on screen to show me exactly who wronged me. When I get them back in a race and slam them with a shell, I see their face spin around in a circle. I quickly begin to dream up other games I'd love to use that feature in, imagining just how braggadocios I could get in Splatoon. What once looked like a gimmick I'd never use now feels like a legitimate social feature that I'll get a lot of mileage out of.
I still have plenty of Switch 2 question marks left, which I plan to clear up before I write up a proper review. I need to test the limits of the console's internal microphone, as I did notice it cutting off a soft-spoken player occasionally. I also have more menus to dig into since the console wasn't online ready yet. I'm especially eager to see what's being described as a smoother eShop, and one that now includes a For You tab meant to help game discoverability. But my takeaway ahead of June 5 is that the Nintendo Switch 2 has a lot of additional nuances that add up. Now tie those in with surprisingly tight mouse controls, a display that continues to impress without the need for an OLED panel, and extra horsepower that lets me see an incredible distance in Mario Kart World. That's enough to make the Switch 2 feel like the significant upgrade that you want to see from a new hardware generation.
The Nintendo Switch 2 launches on June 5.
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