Nintendo Switch 2 hands-on first impressions: Those geniuses have reinvented the wheel again

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There’s no denying that the Grand Palais in Paris is a far more beautiful venue than the ExCeL Centre in London, but we’re told that the core of the experience will be pretty much exactly the same wherever you manage to access this event.

In Paris, we heard rumours that a Hollywood movie star — who happened to be passing and saw the Nintendo signs — was turned away from the Switch 2 Experience. It truly is the hottest ticket in town.

Check out the video above to see exactly how we got on at the event! Or keep on reading for the written version of our very first impressions of Nintendo Switch 2 gameplay.

We're off to the races!

After a brief introduction from Nintendo’s European reps, the great and the good of the gaming press — at least, those of us that didn’t get stuck on the Eurostar — were funnelled into an ornate holding area.

The anticipation was high when the doors finally opened. Imagine if you can, rows and rows of demo stations. A horde of red-shirt-wearing event staff ready to welcome us. The brightly coloured home screen of Mario Kart World on every surface in sight. This is the first room you’ll see when you enter the Nintendo Switch 2 Experience.

After some jostling and waiting around for a viable position, I held a Nintendo Switch 2 in my own hands for the first time. First impressions — it does feel thinner. It kind of feels lighter in the hand. With the screen, you can see immediately the benefits of it being bigger.

It's a bit of a controversial topic that it doesn’t have an OLED screen, but still, I felt that it was a visible upgrade on what I'm used to. You can tell that it's richer in detail.

For example, in Mario Kart World, there are 24 players competing at the same time. There’s a lot more stuff going on the screen — banana peels and coins flying everywhere — which makes it really fun and chaotic.

You can get up to 20 coins now to increase your base speed stats, which is really helpful. I thought that made a big difference. Equally, it’s important to make sure that you actually get a power-up at every opportunity. I didn't win my first race, but I did enjoy seeing the popular new character Cow in action for myself.

The accessory to a crime in your bank balance

While you’re at the Nintendo Switch 2 Experience, you’ll get the opportunity to try out all the different accessories that are coming for the console.

At the Paris event, we noticed that some new steering wheels have been made for the Switch 2 as well. They're quite small, holding one Joy-Con each.

There’s also a new Pro Controller, which feels exactly the same as the old one but is actually slightly different. It has a couple of new buttons on the back, which competitive players will surely find fun uses for.

We also tried out the much-hyped GameCube controller — the original design from back in the day is still pretty questionable, in my opinion, but Nintendo has done a fine job at bringing it back to life here. Wind Waker ran just fine and we enjoyed having the option to throw it back with an unoptimised CRT-style display.

The new Camera accessory is smaller in real life than it looked in the Direct, but it really brought a lot of new fun to playing Mario Party with friends. Seeing yourself on the screen makes it a lot more silly with bags of potential for physical comedy.

There’s also a special carry case for the Switch 2 and its accessories which will slot nicely into your backpack. And all of this combines to mean that, yes, your bank balance is very much in danger.

New magnets, who dis?

Most of the Nintendo Switch 2 consoles at the event are either tethered to the furniture (so you can’t run off with them) or trapped in glass boxes (so you can’t run off with them). But there is one unencumbered console that you can queue up to have a play with.

The main attraction here is that you can get a proper look at the machine and feel it out for yourself. In particular, you’ll want to see how the new Joy-Cons attach with the amazing power of magnets.

I had been worried that the connection wouldn’t feel super strong, but let me tell you, there is literally no chance of these Joy-Cons coming off without you wanting them to.

At the same time, and both of these things can be true, it’s much easier to get them on or off when you do want to. With the press of a discrete new button, the magnets become very simple to remove. But if you don’t press that button, they won’t go anywhere. And the click when you do attach them is very satisfying indeed.

Don't be third to the party

Across a number of giant halls, visitors to the Nintendo Switch 2 Experience will get to try out an impressive number of games — some from Nintendo’s own teams, and others from their ever-growing army of third-party partners.

In terms of the first-party games, I left the event really impressed. Mario Kart World seems really fun, Mario Party Jamboree has got a new lease of life, Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom has never looked better, and Metroid Prime 4 makes amazing use of a new console feature (more on that in a moment).

Plus, I found myself really enjoying Donkey Kong: Bananza, which has a Spyro-like feel with a twist. The twist being that, while you explore a series of puzzling little islands, you’re also capable of smashing through the floor and burrowing for miles in any direction. I got quite addicted to that little mechanic and can imagine spending tens of hours exploring every nook and cranny of that game.

In terms of the third-party developers, they do lag a little bit behind Nintendo in terms of making their games look and feel exactly how you’d want them to on the Switch 2. A number of these games look visibly less nice than they would on a PS5 or a powerful PC.

For example, in Hogwarts Legacy, the level of detail drops dramatically in the middle distance, which does reduce the magical feelings of discovery and wonder that should come with exploring the wizarding world.

On the flip-side of that, in Cyberpunk 2077, we found that the game looked great until we looked too closely at the NPC’s faces. They’ve got a sort of cream-covered lack of finesse to them. Similarly, in Split Fiction, you can see some of the graphics being dumbed down, especially when you focus on the detail of the hair.

Nintendo seems to have the right idea — whether it’s the bright cartoony look of Donkey Kong or the painterly tones of TotK, avoiding a ‘realistic’ look works wonderfully on the new console.

Nintendo changes the game again

There was a whole area reserved for Metroid Prime 4: Beyond, the long-awaited sequel that will be an early test case for the new mouse-like functions of the Nintendo Switch 2 Joy-Cons.

In case you missed the news in the recent Nintendo Direct, basically, you can now use your Joy-Cons in the same way as you would a computer mouse. You can drag them around a flat surface and get more granular control over your movements on the screen.

I really enjoyed playing Metroid Prime 4 like this. It does take some getting used to, and the thin nature of the Joy-Cons does mean that you’re likely to knock the things over from time to time (not ideal in a boss fight). But overall, it feels like a bold new option for the Switch console.

In fact, I’d argue that this is where the Switch 2 most showcases Nintendo’s usual desire to 'surprise and delight' its fans.

When the original Switch came out, the idea of combining a handheld device and a household console felt like a radical change.

It didn’t take long for Valve’s Steam Deck and ASUS’s ROG Ally, and numerous pretenders or varying quality, to launch their own version of a handheld device that could play TV-worthy games.

Now, Nintendo has thrown another gauntlet down, challenging its rivals to top this new innovation — what if the controllers on these hybrid machines weren’t just controllers, but also fully functional computer mice?

It’s easy to imagine the first-person shooter genre adopting this tech very quickly, while detailed simulation games like Civilization 7 and Two Point Museum stand to benefit from it too.

Metroid Prime 4 is a perfect example of a game where you probably do want that bit of extra precision, where you do want to line up your shot and fire it perfectly, especially when your missiles are limited.

If players adopt this tech, it’ll be interesting to see where the Switch dock lives — do you keep it near your TV, or on your desk? Or will players use the tabletop mode more often now that they have the mouse option? Only time will tell, but it’s impressive that Nintendo has reinvented the wheel again with this new addition.

What to expect if you're expecting to visit the Switch 2 Experience

Tragically, we did eventually reach the end of our Switch 2 experience in Paris. We had a few hours to explore, and we found that we kept going back and forth between the different halls to try and cram in more games.

We’d recommend getting here bang on time, if not early, for your session. Make sure you make as much of it as you can. There’s almost too much to see!

There was loads of stuff that we didn’t manage to make time for, and I imagine that will be the prevailing experience for anyone who attends one of these 'experiences'.

Make sure you see the things that mean the most to you, and then you should try to squeeze in whatever else you can.

But whatever you do, be prepared to have some fun and get a lot of steps in! June can’t come soon enough.

The Nintendo Switch 2 launches 5th June, with pre-orders available on the Nintendo Store from 8th April.

Check out more of our Gaming coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.

Make sure you look at the official Nintendo Switch 2 UK release date and Nintendo Switch 2 UK stock updates.