Our first impressions after 48 hours with the Switch 2

As an included freebie with the Switch 2 system, this would merely be tedious. As a game with a $10 asking price, it’s a little insulting.

GameChat is cute, but screen-sharing is rough

After a lengthy initial setup, starting a casual GameChat session with people on your Switch 2 friends list is pretty simple (though, oddly, there seems to be no way to add new people to a GameChat after it starts). The system’s internal microphone does a pretty good job picking up your voice even across a big room, and the head-tracking feature for the camera does a good job keeping you in frame even as you move.

The frame rate on those shared screens is rough.

Credit:
Kyle Orland

GameChat struggles a bit when it comes to screen sharing, though, sending a grainy video of your gameplay at a rough-to-watch rate of about 10 or 15 fps. This is fine if you’re just glancing at what your chatmate is doing occasionally to offer some hints or support. Just don’t expect it to replicate the experience of watching your favorite streamer on Twitch or anything of the like.

The internal storage doesn’t go very far

The Switch 2’s 256GB of built-in storage is plenty if you’re mainly using it to play upgraded old Switch games; even an epic like Tears of the Kingdom is only about 20GB with the upgrade pack. But high-end games designed specifically for the Switch 2 can be a lot bigger: 48GB for Street Fighter 6, nearly 60GB for Cyberpunk 2077, and a whopping 69.2GB for Split Fiction, to cite a few examples. If you plan to download games like these, you’ll need to invest in a MicroSD Express card before too long.

Switch games run a lot better

We’ll have more in-depth coverage of this in the near future, but 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.