I've played part of the Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour, although as you might guess from the title and seeing it in action myself, played is a strong word. You don't play the Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour, you experience it. Sometimes you just watch it do things. But this is a nice little demonstration of the Switch 2's capabilities, which surprised me.
While watching the Nintendo Switch 2 Direct the each little details Very impressed me more than the last. 4K resolution 256GB of storage, 120fps, HDR capable... it was so much more than I thought the Switch 2 would be capable of. And the thing is the Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour isn't for people who understand what any of that means. It's for the larger portion of the Switch audience, who like to play Nintendo games on their couch and hear that a new console has come out. The Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour is essentially a playable Direct that breaks down this jargon into something tangible.
Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour Is for Non-Gamers
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| Credit _Nintendo Switch 2 |
On this front, it succeeds. Though it doesn't look as graphically impressive as games like Cyberpunk 2077 or Street Fighter 6, which I saw in my full hands-on for the console. But it's incredibly vibrant and smooth, especially when you make your little avatar glide across the Switch 2's screen like they're ice skating. It's much more lifeless and corporate than the fun exploration of Astro's Playroom, but it does a good job of illustrating how and why the Switch 2 is better than the Switch.
A lot of this is done through minigames. As you can probably guess by now, the mini does a lot of the heavy work there. You shake the Joy-Con like maracas and dynamic audio makes the beads move around. You drag a spaceship around to avoid falling debris with the Joy-Con mouse, and see how responsive it is. The games also make other improvements more digestible, like showing you a ball moving across the screen and asking you to guess the framerate though the answers never change, so if you give a wrong answer, you can just speed through for the perfect score.
There are hours worth of activities to be had here too. I earned about 12 medals in my ten minutes with the game, but I did see a few areas that required over 100 medals to unlock. It's a quick, easy way to show people who don't quite understand the words Nintendo is using exactly how their games would be better. Or that they would be, if you didn't have to buy it which no one will.
Should You Really Pay for Switch 2’s Welcome Tour?
Quite simply, I don't know who would buy it, or who should. I know video games are more expensive to produce than ever, but so is life. This is from a company that once gave away Wii Sports, one of the best video games ever made for free because it thought the system needed a technical showcase. After Astro's Playroom, it seems odd that there would be a fee for this game, no matter how modest.
Don't get me wrong, if it were free I would lazily complete all the objectives to earn my medals. I would glide across the screen, shaking my maracas at a framerate speed I could recognize to the third decimal place. It's the kind of... experience that let's say, you watch it and enjoy the moment, then wonder why you spent your time on it. But I also watched The Purge movies without any liking. I've played these games before.
As impressive as it is as a tech demo, I don't see any point in buying it. You'll never feel like playing this thing, you won't feel like walking around something that looks like a Microsoft Teams ad and guessing how fast a ball is moving in a minigame you've already played where the answers never change. When you first open up your Switch 2, this is the time you dive in and marvel at what it can do while waiting for Mario Kart World to download. But now, you're just going to have to wait for Mario Kart World to download.
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