Nintendo’s Switch 2 is at the very start of its life — and, as with every young console, excitement for the new hardware is held in check by the quest for something to play on it. Nintendo debuted the system with one of the biggest guns in its arsenal: a new Mario Kart. Elsewhere, the launch line-up has been the usual grab-bag of ports from other consoles and upgrades of past hits, with the occasional third-party original sprinkled in.
It might look like a slim library on paper, but there’s actually a surprising amount to discover on the Switch 2. Modern classics like Street Fighter 6 and Cyberpunk 2077 are given new handheld life, Zelda games and No Man’s Sky are transformed by the handheld’s power, and there are left-field curios like Kunitsu-Gami and Survival Kids.
That’s in addition to (almost) the entire Switch library, playable under backward compatibility on Switch 2. You can check out our list of the best Switch games for inspiration — but at the foot of this article, we’ve also included a quick list of our recommendations of Switch games that, while not considered full-blown Switch 2 Editions, have received worthwhile free updates on the new console.
How we pick the best games on Switch 2
The Polygon staff plays a lot of video games, and everything in this list comes personally recommended by at least one of us. We determined what should be on our list of the best Switch 2 games by looking at the quality of each title, but also with an eye for breadth and variety — so you should find something on the list you’ll enjoy, no matter what genres of game you like, how much time you have, or what vibe you are after.
Arcade Archives 2: Ridge Racer
Is it perverse to use a powerful new gaming handheld to play a 32-year-old game? Probably. But I won’t apologize for revelling in this port of Namco’s seminal 1993 arcade title. Stripped-down and purposeful, this is as pure as racing games come: just a race car, the track, the clock, perhaps the best-feeling drifting in any game, and a series of wedge-shaped, primary-colored opponents drifting through the corners alongside you. It’s bliss.
Hamster’s excellent Arcade Archives series is all about slavish authenticity to the original coin-op. That means this release doesn’t have as many features as the famous port for the PlayStation; with just one playable car and one track, it’s definitely a purist approach. But it’s also beautiful in its primitive way, and incredibly smooth and crisp. A true classic as it was meant to be played. —Oli Welsh
Cyberpunk 2077
Big, open worlds like Cyberpunk 2077‘s are best explored at your own pace, which makes the Switch 2 version of CD Projekt Red’s urban RPG an ideal way to see the sights of Night City. And you should see those sights. The game’s central tale occasionally takes the gruff cynicism of its setting a bit too far, but under the grittiness is a sincere and even poignant take on what it means to live a worthwhile life against all odds, and on the dangers of letting Big Business amass too much influence. Much of that comes through in Cyberpunk 2077‘s excellent side quests and character stories, and despite how demanding the game is on hardware, it holds up brilliantly on the Switch 2.
Well, almost. Performance in Phantom Liberty is a bit dodgy, but the base game is stable with clear resolution. The Switch 2’s additional control options are a nice bonus as well. Motion controls work with surprising effectiveness and help mitigate the awkwardness of playing an FPS game with an analog stick, and if you want even more precision, you can use the Joy-Con 2’s mouse controls in tabletop or docked mode. —Josh Broadwell
Deltarune
Undertale‘s magic happens in the touching character moments and smaller stories amid Toby Fox’s bigger, often hamfisted tale about how getting along is better than hurting everyone. Deltarune, Undertale‘s spiritual successor, leans heavily into the former and becomes a playground for ideas more than a traditional story. It’s so much better for it. Kris, Deltarune‘s protagonist, gets caught up in a supernatural plot involving Dark Worlds, distinct civilizations themed around specific real-world problems like obsessing over public image or refusing to acknowledge death and loss. It’s endlessly inventive, and it lets Deltarune explore a broader variety of emotions, storytelling styles, and methods of character development than its predecessor.
Charming as Toby Fox’s characters and quirky worlds are, the best thing about Deltarune is its clever battle system that adds a bespoke touch to Undertale‘s options of fighting or taking a pacifist route. You guide a little heart through torrents of enemy projectiles to keep the party from taking damage, but Fox also weaves elements of whatever’s happening in the story into most encounters — forcing you to work around an old man’s walking stick, for example, or changing the battle depending on whether you play along with a narcissistic TV host’s twisted quiz. Deltarune might not attract as much attention as something like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, but it quietly has one of the best turn-based battle systems out there. —JB
Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time
Level-5 might be best known outside Japan for its Professor Layton puzzle mysteries, but the studio is also a master of pleasurable grind and cute world-building, going all the way back to its PlayStation 2 role-playing games like Dark Cloud. Fantasy Life i follows this tradition. It’s a sequel to a 2014 3DS game, and it combines RPG and life-sim mechanics in a way that’s almost impossible to put down.
It’s an adorable, cozy, and totally engrossing experience. There are over a dozen Lifes — swappable jobs, essentially — to burrow deep into, covering combat, crafting, and gathering. They’re simple but compellingly designed, with a limitless possibility for self-improvement. Cooking alone can become an all-consuming obsession in Fantasy Life i. Until we get a new Animal Crossing, this is the ultimate comfort-gaming experience on the Switch 2. —OW
Fast Fusion
Fast Fusion looks deceptively simple at first glance, like a legally distinct F-Zero game. You race streamlined, futuristic cars at impossible speeds — 400 mph is slow in Fast Fusion — across tracks that frequently defy gravity, and you use well-timed speed boosts to get ahead of your opponents. Where F-Zero has you recover boost power by driving over pit stops, Fast Fusion makes you work for it by collecting coins, and that’s what gives this game a strong identity of its own.
Most boost-recovering coins are floating above the course or pop up in otherwise hard-to-reach areas, so in addition to figuring out how best to handle sharp curves at 500 mph, you have to plan jumps and balance speed boosts with risky maneuvers to maintain your momentum as well. It’s exhilarating and strategic in equal measure, and the blend of sci-fi futurism with rich, natural settings looks absolutely gorgeous on the Switch 2. —JB
Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess
Critics praised Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess‘ old-school charm when Capcom first launched it in July 2024, and that charm is still very much present nearly a year later in the Switch 2 version. In this mix of Japanese folklore, real-time strategy, and tower defense, you play as a warrior tasked with escorting a shrine maiden down a cursed mountain, protecting her as she performs a ritual to close gates that terrible creatures from another dimension use to enter the field of play.
By day, you recruit villagers and place them strategically around the map to head off the otherworldly invaders when night falls. These monsters and their influence on the environment create a surreal visual spectacle and they’re entirely unpredictable. Even in the earlier, more straightforward missions, Kunitsu-Gami expects you to adapt on the fly and never get too comfortable with your strategy, regardless of how foolproof it seems. Trite as it sounds to say there’s nothing like Kunitsu-Gami, there really is little else like it. —JB
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild & Tears of the Kingdom
At launch, Nintendo’s new console was blessed with gorgeous Switch 2 Editions of two of the greatest games of all time: 2017’s Switch launch game The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and its 2023 sequel, Tears of the Kingdom. You can take or leave the Zelda Notes smartphone companion app feature, but once you’ve played these games in higher resolution at a flawlessly crisp 60 frames per second, there’s no going back. They just feel so much better.
Which to play? Take your pick. Breath of the Wild is simpler, tougher, a little bit more of a survival game, but still sweeping in scale. Tears of the Kingdom, with its added maps in the sky and underground, is bewilderingly huge but also effortless in the freedom offered by its game-changing tools. Both are well worth revisiting, whether to mop up the last shrines or start all over again. And if you haven’t played them, they’re nothing short of essential. —OW
Mario Kart World
It was never going to be easy to follow Mario Kart 8, which over two editions on two systems became not just the ultimate Mario Kart but the fifth-best-selling game of all time. Nintendo has been both bold and cautious in Mario Kart World. It lets the racing spill out over an open-world map and changes the style, moving toward open, point-to-point contests. But it also structures the game in a way that’s deeply reassuring and familiar.
It’s been mildly controversial among the online Mario Kart hardcore — but for everyone else, this is a lavishly produced and thoroughly enjoyable racing romp, best enjoyed in local multiplayer, as always. The racing is technically rewarding, the music is fantastic, the collectable characters, costumes, and vehicles are endlessly creative and fun. There’s even a chill free-roam mode for solo sessions, too. —OW
No Man’s Sky
The fact that Hello Games managed to get its behemoth space game No Man’s Sky running on the original Switch was impressive, though that doesn’t mean it performed well or was particularly nice to look at. Blurry resolution, severe asset pop-in, and stuttering frame rates made for a stark contrast to other platforms. Hello Games’ Switch 2 upgrade — which is free to download, but still an official Nintendo Switch 2 Edition — was a year in the making and fixes all those issues and more. Performance is better, resolution clearer, and lighting brighter and more colorful, among other things.
Hello Games’ frequent updates to No Man’s Sky turned it into an impressively varied game that goes beyond your standard survival game. Deep customization, weird and wonderful planets to explore, extensive base building, story quests to follow, abandoned ships to loot — that’s just some of what Hello Games crammed in here, alongside entire towns to plan and govern, thanks to the settlements update finally landing on Switch 2. —JB
Split Fiction
Hazelight’s follow-up to the somehow 20-million-selling It Takes Two is another exercise in a genre that everyone seems to want but nobody else seems to make: split-screen, co-op action-adventure for two players. Josef Fares and his team are now three games in and locked into this specialism, and Split Fiction delivers exactly where you want it to.
Which is to say that it’s great fun to play through with a family member or partner, stuffed with fun and novel co-op mechanics and genuine gameplay challenges. It’s all beautifully thought out, which is sadly more than you can say for the hand-wavy sci-fi story about two authors battling to find common ground in a kind of AI simulation. But it’s a genuinely great co-op game, and thanks to the Switch 2’s detachable controllers and tabletop mode, this version is uniquely playable anywhere. —OW
Street Fighter 6
Street Fighter 6 was already one of the most welcoming fighting games for rusty veterans and genre newcomers, and the portability of the Switch 2 version makes it even more convenient. Capcom packed Street Fighter 6 with an impressively vast roster of playable characters, which guarantees there’s at least one fighter whose style clicks with you, and a series of detailed tutorials for each gradually eases you into the game’s complexities without feeling overwhelming. Combine approachability with fantastically over-the-top animations and a visual style that looks exceptional even locked at 720p in handheld mode, and you’ve got a fighting game that’s a joy to play, even if you’ve never thrown a virtual punch before.
If you’re going online to play against others, though, you’ll want to use a Switch 2 Pro Controller and stick the console in tabletop mode, or use third-party accessories. Street Fighter 6 is playable despite the Joy-Con 2’s lack of d-pad, but stringing combos together quickly is easier if you use a different controller. You can download a free demo from the game’s eShop page if you want to see how the controls feel before committing. —JB
Survival Kids
This surprise resurrection of an old Konami series is perhaps the best game in the Switch 2 launch line-up for families and younger players (Mario Kart World aside). Survival Kids was created as an in-house exercise by game engine company Unity, but if that makes it sound like a rote exercise, it’s happily anything but. It’s an easygoing, super-approachable survival game that comes to life when played in local co-op. Best of all, it supports Nintendo’s GameShare system, so a Switch 2 can beam the game to two nearby Switches for three-player co-op.
Survival Kids is survival gaming with all the fiddling removed — presented in a top-down, isometric-style perspective, it’s focused on simple one-button interactions, and there’s no need to worry too much about inventory management and the like. It’s just a busy, fun scramble as your team runs about gathering, crafting, cooking, and building as they explore a remote treasure island. A charming adventure for the whole family. —OW
The best free Switch 2 upgrades
Nintendo has issued free patches for several Switch games that improve visuals and performance on Switch 2, or add compatibility for the new console’s features. A few of these are transformative enough that they make the games worth recommending anew. Here are our picks:
Arms: You’d be forgiven if Nintendo’s bizarre, bendy-armed fighting game from the Switch’s early days passed you by. But it’s a hilarious and captivating original that was developed as a side-project by the Mario Kart team, and it’s as fresh as ever in 4K, 60 frames per second on the Switch 2.
Clubhouse Games: 51 Worldwide Classics: Nintendo’s collection of classic card games, board games, and parlour games is an obvious candidate for GameShare support, and it works perfectly. Easily eats up train journeys for the whole family (and they don’t all have to have Switch 2s).
The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening & Echoes of Wisdom: This pair of old-school Zeldas, developed by Grezzo in partnership with Nintendo, are adorably styled but always had performance issues on Switch. The Switch 2 smooths the judder away and both games are vastly improved — especially the freeform, object-conjuring Echoes of Wisdom.
Super Mario 3D World + Bowser’s Fury: Bowser’s Fury, a massive open-world expansion that was added to the Wii U’s 3D World on its Switch release, must be the least-played 3D Mario adventure. It gets a new lease of life at 60 fps on Switch 2; if you missed it first time, it’s like having a whole new Mario game to enjoy.
Super Mario Odyssey: There’s a much smaller chance that you didn’t play the Switch’s marquee Mario game, but it looks gorgeous and smooth on the Switch 2, and there’s GameShare support for anyone who wants to join in as Cappy.
The post The 12 best Switch 2 games appeared first on Polygon.
