Nintendo Switch 2 Review

Sixteen hours on the Rajdhani, Delhi to Mumbai. If you’ve done that run you’ll know the shape of it — the first two hours pass fine, the next four you tolerate, and the last ten feel like a sentence. This time, though, I had the Nintendo Switch 2 in my bag, and I’m not stretching the truth when I say the whole thing blurred past. The retired bank manager across from me ended up watching me play Mario Kart World for a good forty minutes before he leaned in and asked, “yeh kya hai, beta?” That, more or less, is the Switch 2 in a sentence. It pulls people in.

Three weeks of using it now, and it’s turned into this odd household fixture. My wife plays Animal Crossing before bed. My nephew drops by specifically for it. Even my dad — who hadn’t touched a video game since the NES era — picked it up last weekend to poke at Zelda. Nintendo has this thing where it just works across ages. Nobody else manages that.

The Stuff That’s Genuinely New

Let me clear the headline specs first. The Switch 2 runs on a custom Nvidia Tegra T239 chip with DLSS 4 upscaling. Handheld, you get a far bigger 7.9-inch 1080p LCD — a serious step up from the original’s 6.2-inch 720p panel. Dock it and it pushes 4K to your TV through that DLSS trickery. RAM triples, 4GB to 12GB LPDDR5. Storage is 256GB internal. The Joy-Con 2 controllers clip on with magnets now instead of the old click-rail. And yes, it’ll play basically every Switch 1 game you already own.

That’s a heap of upgrades crammed into something that’s still, at heart, a thing you hold in your hands. Worth picking apart one by one.

How It Sits in Your Hands

Bigger. That hits you first. The Switch 2 is plainly larger than the original, but it had to be — a 7.9-inch screen was never fitting into the old shell. And honestly? The extra size makes it more comfortable, not less. My hands used to cramp on the original after about an hour. That’s stopped.

Build quality’s jumped a fair bit too. That plasticky, toy-ish feel of the first Switch is gone. The shell still isn’t metal, but the plastic feels denser, more deliberate. There’s a confidence in how solid it is when you grip it.

Then the Joy-Con 2 controllers, which I think people are underselling. The magnetic lock replaces the old click-lock rails, and that one change probably spares Nintendo a mountain of drift complaints down the road. The magnets are strong — reassuringly so. I’ve shaken the console hard and they don’t shift. Trigger travel’s better, and the mouse-click function on the Joy-Cons opens up control schemes I genuinely hadn’t pictured.

The kickstand. At last. It now runs the full width of the console’s bottom edge, the way the Steam Deck does it. That flimsy little flip-out tab on the original was frankly embarrassing for a company this design-literate. Tabletop mode is actually usable now. I propped it on the berth table in my compartment and it held its place even through the train’s usual rock-and-sway.

That Screen, Though

The 7.9-inch 1080p LCD. There’ll be grumbling that it isn’t OLED, and I get it — the Switch OLED spoiled people with those inky blacks and saturated colour. But here’s the thing. This LCD is genuinely good. Colours are punchy, brightness is plenty for indoor play, and HDR support makes Nintendo’s first-party stuff look lovely.

Playing the Switch 2 Enhanced version of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom in handheld? Everything snaps into focus. The greens of Hyrule Field, the golden-hour light, the particle effects — it all looks so much better than it did on the original that it nearly reads as a different game. The 720p-to-1080p jump feels bigger than the numbers let on.

The anti-glare coating earns a line of its own. If you’ve ever tried gaming on a glossy screen by a window with Indian afternoon sun pouring through, you know the misery. This coating helps. It doesn’t kill glare outright, but it drags it from “forget it” down to “totally fine” in most lighting.

One caveat — it’s a 60Hz panel. That’s standard for Nintendo, and their art style doesn’t beg for higher refresh the way a competitive PC shooter does. It’s perfectly fine. But coming off a 120Hz phone or the ROG Ally, you might clock the difference at first.

Performance — Where It Gets Interesting

Here’s where the Tegra T239 and DLSS 4 flex. Docked, the Switch 2 renders at 1080p natively then leans on DLSS to push 4K. The result is, frankly, a bit startling for a device this size and price. Nintendo’s art — the cel-shading, the bright palettes, the stylised characters — upscales beautifully through DLSS. Pixel-peep and it isn’t native 4K, but at normal couch distance on a living-room TV? It looks fantastic.

Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Enhanced runs 1080p 60fps handheld and 4K 60fps docked. Smooth as you like. No drops I caught in normal play. The original Switch build of that game would grind down to maybe 20fps in spots — that’s just gone now.

The 12GB of RAM does more than you’d guess. Load times shrink hard. That original-Switch ritual where you’d fast-travel and then stare at a loading screen for 30 to 40 seconds? Down to maybe 8 to 10 in most games I tried, near-instant in some. It changes the whole rhythm of playing, and I don’t say that lightly.

The Switch 2-native first-party games will be the real showcase, and you can already see it in Mario Kart World and the new Metroid. These look genuinely impressive. Not PS5 impressive — let’s stay honest — but for a hybrid portable, well past what I’d braced for.

Battery — The Forever Question

Nintendo quotes 4.5 to 7 hours handheld. In my testing, hammering demanding Switch 2 titles at full brightness, I hit about 4 hours 45 before the low-battery warning. Lighter fare — indies, older Switch 1 games, turn-based stuff — got me near 6.5.

For that train trip? I packed a 20,000mAh power bank. The Switch 2 charges over USB-C, so any half-decent bank does the job. Between the internal cell and the bank I had juice to spare across the whole Delhi-to-Mumbai run. This is one of the quietly great things about the Switch as a platform — USB-C charging off a standard power bank is just so practical for Indian travel. Long bus rides, flights, dead time at a railway station. It simply works.

The Ecosystem — Games, Online, Family

Nintendo’s first-party library is unmatched. Full stop. Nobody else has Mario, Zelda, Pokemon, Metroid, Animal Crossing, Splatoon and Smash Bros under one roof. Kids, family, the joy of couch co-op with friends — nothing else comes close.

Backward compatibility means your Switch 1 collection carries over. I had about 30 digital games from the eShop and every one showed up on the Switch 2 ready to pull down. Physical cartridges work too. That matters, because you’re not starting from a blank slate — there are thousands of games available day one.

The new GameShare feature is clever. With a physical game card, you can share it over local wireless to a friend’s Switch 2 for a multiplayer session. For an Indian family where maybe two siblings each have a Switch 2, that means one physical copy covers playing together locally. Genuinely thoughtful for cost-conscious households.

Nintendo Switch Online hands you cloud saves, online multiplayer, and the retro libraries — NES, SNES, N64, Game Boy. For someone like me, raised on Super Mario Bros 3 on a bootleg NES clone, having those games with proper controller support on a modern device is straight nostalgia fuel.

Local wireless play stretches to eight consoles. The Joy-Cons split off for instant two-player on a single unit, motion controls included where games support them. I’ve had four people on Mario Kart on my TV with two pairs of Joy-Cons, and the chaos was exactly the kind of evening that makes everyone forget their phones for a couple of hours.

Specs at a Glance

What I Like

The Storage Situation

I have to flag the 256GB storage, because it’s probably my biggest day-to-day gripe. Modern games are large. Even Nintendo first-party titles run 15-20GB, and some third-party ports are far bigger. I filled 256GB inside the first two weeks. You’ll want a microSD card — at least 512GB, ideally 1TB. microSD prices in India have fallen a lot, so a decent 512GB card shouldn’t run you more than 3,000-3,500 rupees. Annoying that you need one at all, but it isn’t a dealbreaker.

Against the Competition

The Switch 2 doesn’t really go toe-to-toe with the PS5 or Xbox Series X on raw power. It isn’t trying to. What it offers instead is something neither Sony nor Microsoft can — a true hybrid portable-and-home console carrying Nintendo’s exclusive library. The Steam Deck and ROG Ally are technically stronger handhelds, but they’ve got no Mario, no Zelda, and their shapes aren’t as family-friendly.

The fairest parallel might be the Switch-versus-Vita story from 2017. On paper the Vita was potent for its day, but the Switch had the games and the concept that clicked with people. The Switch 2 sits in a similar spot — maybe not the best spec sheet, but the package as a whole is hard to beat.

Who Should Buy This

Families. If you’ve got kids between, say, 5 and 15, this is probably the single best gaming buy you can make. The library’s family-friendly, the Joy-Cons make multiplayer easy, and the parental controls are solid. Indian families especially — where a console usually gets shared across the house — will find the Switch 2 slots right in.

Anyone who travels a lot. The USB-C charging, the portable shape, the strong battery — it’s built for Indian commuters and travellers. Trains, flights, waiting rooms. A genuine lifesaver during delays and long hauls.

Nintendo fans. Obviously. If you’re already in the ecosystem, this is a no-brainer upgrade — your games carry over, the improvements land across the board, and the new titles will be worth it.

Casual gamers. People who don’t fancy a PS5 or a gaming-PC build but still want a quality experience. Under 35,000 rupees, it’s reachable.

Who Shouldn’t Buy This

Hardcore AAA gamers. If your diet is mostly Call of Duty, Cyberpunk, GTA and the like at max settings — this isn’t your device. The Switch 2 gets some third-party ports, but they’re cut-down versions. A PS5 or a gaming PC is what you’re after.

People who already own a Switch OLED and don’t care about 4K docked. The OLED honestly still has a nicer handheld screen in some respects (those blacks), and if you mostly play handheld and don’t need the extra grunt, maybe wait for a price drop or a must-have exclusive that truly leans on the new hardware. No rush — your OLED isn’t going anywhere, and the Switch 1 library has plenty of life left.

Price in India

The Nintendo Switch 2 is priced at Rs. 34,990 in India. You can pick it up through Nintendo India’s official distributor, Amazon India, and game retailers around the country. At that price I think it’s genuinely excellent value for what you get. Compare it, honestly, to what you’d drop on a mid-range phone that’s obsolete in two years — the Switch 2 stays relevant for the better part of a decade.

Final Thoughts

Look, I could go on about specs and frame rates all night. But what stays with me about the Switch 2 isn’t the DLSS 4 or the 12GB of RAM or any of that. It’s the moments. My nephew’s face when he downed a Zelda boss for the first time. My wife giggling quietly at something in Animal Crossing at 11 PM, thinking I’m asleep. That retired bank manager on the Rajdhani, watching Mario Kart with this look of plain, childlike wonder.

My dad bought a Famicom clone from Palika Bazaar in 1992. I was seven. He set it up on our 14-inch Videocon TV and we played Duck Hunt together. He was hopeless at it. But he laughed — this big, real belly laugh — every time the dog popped up to mock him. I hadn’t heard him laugh like that over a video game in thirty-odd years.

Until the Switch 2.

He picked up the Joy-Con, squinted at Zelda’s opening, and said “chalo, dikhao kaise khelein.” And for the next hour we played together. A seventy-year-old man and his thirty-something son, on a sofa in 2026, sharing the same joy they’d shared over a bootleg NES in 1992.

That’s what Nintendo does. That’s the part no spec sheet will ever hold. And it’s why, at Rs. 34,990, the Switch 2 isn’t only a gaming console. It might be the best money you put into family entertainment this year.

Full Specifications

Pros

• DLSS 4 achieves 4K docked
• 7.9-inch 1080p handheld upgrade
• Joy-Con 2 mouse click new gameplay
• All Switch 1 backward compatible
• Nintendo exclusives unmatched

Cons

• LCD not OLED
• Limited third-party AAA
• 256GB fills quickly
• Accessory compatibility varies

Our Rating: 9/10 · Price: ₹34,990