We’ve got a Nintendo Switch 2 console – here’s when to expect our review

Nintendo Switch 2 consoles are just now arriving with press but it’s going to be a long time before there are any full reviews.

The Nintendo Switch 2 is out on Thursday, June 5 but as you’ll have noticed, nowhere on the internet has any reviews of either the games or the console itself. We have new hands-on previews of Mario Kart World and Welcome Tour but those are based on preview events from a couple of weeks ago. Nevertheless, we now finally have an actual Switch 2 console of our own, so we’ll be able to work on some actual reviews.

The console turned up this afternoon, as you can see below, along with the official camera, the new pro controller, and a physical copy of Mario Kart World. That’s all that was in the parcel that arrived, but Nintendo has promised to send download codes for Welcome Tour and the Nintendo Switch 2 Editions of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild and Tears Of The Kingdom on Thursday.

There’s no point asking why it’s being done like this, because it’s Nintendo, but they’ve clearly told third party publishers to follow the same pattern, as we’re not getting those download codes until later today or Thursday. As far as we know this is the same situation for all outlets, so that’s going to have a big impact on when reviews start to appear.

The wider problem here is that it’s not-E3 week. To what degree Nintendo was aware of that before they picked the launch date it’s hard to say, but they themselves have not yet announced a Nintendo Direct, even though they’ve always previously had one in early or mid-June. They are an official partner of Summer Game Fest on Friday though, so they can’t pretend they didn’t know about that.

But it’s not just Summer Game Fest. Tonight there’s Sony’s new State of Play, IO Interactive has an event at 2am on Saturday revealing their new James Bond game, and then there’s the Xbox Games Showcase on Sunday evening.

And that’s just the big ones, there’s also Day of the Devs and Devolver Digital on Friday, Future Games Show Summer Showcase on Saturday, PC Gaming Show on Sunday, and literally many more. All the smaller events must surely know they’ll get little to no coverage, especially this week, but that’s the situation.

We’ll do everything we can to give equal coverage to everything (we hear on the grapevine that there are some major announcements coming for Summer Game Fest and the State of Play) and that is going to further impact our Switch 2 coverage.

One of us will do an all-nighter tonight, to try and get a review in progress ready for Mario Kart World on Thursday, but it’s going to be next week until there’s a scored review for anything, or any kind of formal review of the console itself.

As we said on Tuesday, we don’t think Nintendo is purposefully trying to hide anything with all this. Instead, it seems to be an unfortunate mix of bad timing and Nintendo’s usual overcautiousness, in this regarding day one patches (which we assume relate to online play, when it comes to Mario Kart).

That said, there certainly are some puzzling aspects to Mario Kart World, in regard to the lack of integration between the open world and the rest of the game, that perhaps Nintendo were keen not to have discussed until the last moment.

Ultimately, this all comes down to the publishers’ longstanding inability to use a calendar sensibly (never mind release dates, why was the Nintendo Switch 2 Direct the same day Trump’s tariffs were announced?) or to accept that they are not the only company in the games industry. Although we’ve rarely seen those deficiencies cause such turmoil as this before.

On Thursday, ordinary people will be receiving their Nintendo Switch 2 pre-orders and the internet will be awash with first impressions and, no doubt, false information. Just be cautious and recognise that no one at the moment has spent any significant amount of time with the Switch 2 and so it’s far too early to draw a definitive conclusion about it or its games.

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