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Nintendo Switch 2 Review: Is It Worth £395 for Casual UK Gamers in 2025?

May 21, 2026 • 22 min read
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Sarah Hargreaves — Culture & Features Editor, RetroInHand

Last updated: May 2026

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My cousin James rang me the evening Nintendo announced the Switch 2 price for the UK and said, simply: “Three hundred and ninety-five quid.” There was a long pause. We’d both grown up in houses where a new console was a Christmas negotiation that started in September, where you read the same issue of Nintendo Magazine System four times because you couldn’t afford the actual game. The idea that a Nintendo console — Nintendo, the people who once sold us a grey plastic brick with a black-and-white screen for the price of a family meal out — now costs nearly four hundred pounds wasn’t just surprising. It felt like a statement about who gaming thinks it’s for.

So: is the Nintendo Switch 2 worth £395 for casual UK gamers in 2025? The short answer is yes, but only under specific circumstances, and those circumstances matter enormously. This isn’t a universal recommendation. For some people reading this — people who grew up queuing outside Woolworths for a PAL SNES, who still own a working Game Boy somewhere in a drawer, who maybe dip into modern gaming once or twice a year — the Switch 2 is genuinely brilliant and genuinely worth it. For others, it’s a beautiful machine that solves a problem they don’t have. I’ll be straight with you about which is which, because that’s the only useful thing I can do.

What follows is my attempt to think through this properly — not just as a spec sheet comparison, but as a question about value, about what gaming means in your life right now, and about whether Nintendo has earned your £395 in 2025. I’ve been playing the Switch 2 for several weeks, I’ve come at it from the perspective of someone who writes about gaming culture rather than just hardware, and I have some fairly strong opinions. Let’s get into it.

What Is the Nintendo Switch 2, and What Do You Actually Get for £395?

The Nintendo Switch 2 launched in the UK on 5th June 2025, priced at £395.99 for the console on its own, or £429.99 bundled with Mario Kart World. That bundle is actually the smarter buy if you’re coming in fresh, though we’ll get to the game itself shortly. The console-only price is the one that’s been generating the most friction, and it’s the one worth interrogating.

The hardware itself is a significant step up from the original Switch. The screen is a 7.9-inch LCD — larger than both the original Switch (6.2 inches) and the Switch OLED (7 inches), though notably it’s LCD rather than OLED, which is a choice that’s raised eyebrows. In handheld mode you’re looking at 1080p resolution, which is genuinely lovely to look at, and in docked mode the console outputs up to 4K with Nintendo’s upscaling technology doing some heavy lifting. The new Nvidia chip inside is a meaningful generational leap — games run smoother, load faster, and look considerably better than anything the original hardware could manage.

The new Joy-Con 2 controllers attach magnetically rather than sliding onto rails, which sounds like a small thing until you’ve used it — it’s significantly more satisfying and feels far more secure. They’re also larger, which is welcome news for anyone who found the original Joy-Cons criminally undersized for adult hands. There’s a new C button that connects you to a GameChat feature — Nintendo’s attempt at a voice and video chat system that integrates with the console — and a mouse mode that allows the right Joy-Con to function as a mouse on flat surfaces, primarily used in Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour and a handful of other titles.

The full box contents at £395.99

  • Nintendo Switch 2 console
  • Nintendo Switch 2 dock
  • Two Joy-Con 2 controllers (one left, one right) with grip
  • Joy-Con 2 charging grip
  • HDMI cable (2.0)
  • USB-C power adapter
  • Console stand

What you don’t get is a game. Unlike the original Switch launch, which came bundled with nothing but at a significantly lower price, Nintendo has opted to offer the game separately or as a bundle premium. The original Switch launched at £279.99 in 2017 — already considered steep at the time — and the Switch 2 represents a £116 increase over eight years. Factor in inflation and that gap narrows, but it doesn’t disappear entirely.

Backwards compatibility: the thing Nintendo got right

Here’s the thing that actually matters most for people coming from the original Switch: the Switch 2 plays virtually all original Switch cartridges and digital games. This isn’t just a footnote — it’s one of the most consumer-friendly decisions Nintendo has made in years, and it makes a real difference to the value calculation. If you already own a Switch library, that library comes with you. Your copy of Breath of the Wild, your Animal Crossing island, your Hollow Knight save — all of it transfers.

Some original Switch games also receive free or paid “Switch 2 Edition” upgrades that improve performance or add features. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom both received performance patches. Whether the paid upgrades represent good value is a separate conversation, but the base backwards compatibility is solid and welcome.

A Brief History of Nintendo Console Pricing in the UK (And Why It Matters)

To understand why £395 feels the way it does, you have to understand where Nintendo has positioned itself historically. This matters because so many of the people asking “is it worth it?” grew up with a specific relationship to Nintendo pricing — one that was built on the idea that Nintendo hardware was premium but accessible.

The original Game Boy launched in the UK in 1990 for around £69.99, which sounds cheap until you adjust for inflation — that’s roughly £175 in today’s money. The SNES launched in 1992 for £150, approximately £340 now. The N64 arrived in 1997 at £250 (around £490 today). The GameCube in 2002 cost £199 (about £365 now). The Wii in 2006 was £179 (roughly £280 today). The Wii U in 2012 was £249 (around £350 today). The original Switch in 2017 was £279.99 (about £390 in 2025 money).

What this history actually shows is that the Switch 2 at £395 isn’t dramatically out of line with Nintendo’s historical pricing when adjusted for inflation — but it is the most expensive Nintendo console at launch in nominal terms, and in an era of genuine cost-of-living pressure, nominal price is what people experience at the checkout. The psychological weight of seeing “£395” is real, regardless of what a CPI calculator says.

There’s a broader cultural point here too. Nintendo built its identity — particularly through the DS era and the Wii era — on being the gaming company that welcomed people who didn’t think of themselves as gamers. “Blue ocean strategy” was the corporate term; what it meant in practice was that your mum played Brain Training, your nan loved Wii Sports, and gaming stopped feeling like a hobby that required significant financial commitment to enter. The Switch continued that tradition reasonably well at £279. At £395, the welcome mat feels slightly smaller.

The Games: What’s Actually Available at Launch and What’s Coming

Hardware is only ever as good as its software, and this is where the Switch 2’s case either succeeds or falls apart depending on your tastes. Let’s be honest about the launch lineup before we get to the exciting bits.

Mario Kart World (£59.99 standalone, or £34 upgrade with bundle)

This is the game. Not just the launch game — the game that justifies the entire machine for a certain type of player. Mario Kart World is the first mainline Mario Kart since Mario Kart 8 Deluxe in 2017, and it’s a substantial step forward. The headline addition is a genuine open world — you can drive between courses, explore a connected map, and discover secrets between races rather than just selecting tracks from a menu. It’s closer in spirit to what a fully realised Nintendo racing world looks like than anything that came before it.

The new 24-player online races are chaotic in the best possible way. The roster of characters has expanded significantly. The courses themselves are beautiful — more varied, more vertically interesting, and more willing to do genuinely strange things with their settings. If you have children, or if Mario Kart has ever been your gateway drug to gaming gatherings with friends, this alone makes a reasonable case for the hardware purchase.

What it isn’t is a revolution in kart racing mechanics. The core feel is recognisably Mario Kart. If you bounced off MK8 Deluxe or simply don’t find the format enjoyable, Mario Kart World isn’t going to convert you. It’s the best version of a beloved thing rather than a fundamentally new thing.

The wider launch window

Beyond Mario Kart, the launch window lineup for Switch 2 is — let’s be honest — a bit thin if you’re not already invested in Nintendo’s franchises. Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour is a tech demo dressed up as a game, interesting for about an hour. Donkey Kong Bananza is generating genuine excitement and looks like a proper 3D platformer with soul, landing later in the summer. Metroid Prime 4: Beyond is confirmed for 2025 and looks extraordinary for the audience it’s aimed at.

Third-party support at launch is better than it was for the original Switch but still notably behind PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X in terms of multiplatform AAA titles. Cyberpunk 2077 is coming to Switch 2. Split Fiction is on the platform. Several major ports are arriving throughout 2025. But if you want every major multiplatform release day-and-date, this still isn’t the console for that.

For casual players — which is specifically our audience today — the honest assessment is: there are perhaps two or three must-have games available right now, with a credible pipeline for the rest of the year. That’s not terrible, but it’s not the situation where you’ll run out of things to play immediately on launch day either.

The Casual Gamer Question: Who Are We Actually Talking About?

I want to be specific about what I mean by “casual gamer” here, because the term gets used so loosely that it becomes meaningless. I’m not talking about someone who has no interest in games whatsoever. I’m talking about the reader of this site — someone who grew up on retro gaming, who still has feelings about the SNES or the Mega Drive or the Game Boy, who perhaps plays games a few times a week or a few times a month rather than every day, and who is weighing up whether a £395 modern Nintendo console fits into their life and their budget in 2025.

That person is, in many ways, Nintendo’s ideal customer. Nintendo has always built games that reward the kind of player who engages thoughtfully rather than obsessively — games that are joyful on a Tuesday evening, that make sense in short sessions, that don’t require you to memorise ability trees or grind for equipment before you can enjoy the main event. Mario Kart, Animal Crossing, Zelda, Pokémon — these are games that work for people with jobs, families, finite time, and an unwillingness to spend forty hours on a tutorial.

The question isn’t really “is the Switch 2 a good console?” It manifestly is. The question is whether the value proposition makes sense for someone who might play it for two hours on a Saturday and then not again for two weeks. And that’s a genuinely difficult question to answer without knowing your specific circumstances.

Nintendo Switch 2 vs the Original Switch OLED: Should You Upgrade?

This is the question I get asked most frequently, and it deserves a direct answer. If you currently own a Nintendo Switch OLED (£309.99), upgrading to a Switch 2 right now costs you either the full £395 or whatever you can recoup by selling your OLED first — currently around £200-£250 in decent condition on eBay, making your effective upgrade cost somewhere between £145 and £195.

Is that worth it? For the casual player: probably not immediately, no. The Switch OLED is still a genuinely excellent console. The screen is in some respects better — the OLED panel is richer and punchier than the Switch 2’s LCD, which is a genuine and somewhat baffling backwards step for a premium upgrade. If you primarily play in handheld mode and you already have a good Switch library, the case for upgrading right now is weaker than Nintendo might like.

The argument for upgrading is primarily about future-proofing. The Switch 2 is where Nintendo’s new games are going to live. Within a year or two, the most exciting releases will be Switch 2 exclusives, and the original Switch will increasingly feel like a platform in gentle decline. That happened to the 3DS once the Switch arrived, and it happened to the Wii U when the Switch launched. Nintendo is loyal to its current platform right up to the moment it isn’t, and when the shift happens, it tends to happen decisively.

If you don’t currently own a Switch at all — if you’re coming to Nintendo fresh, or coming back after years away — the calculation is different and considerably more favourable to the Switch 2. There’s no legacy to protect, and you’d be entering the platform at the moment when its library is about to grow most aggressively.

Nintendo Switch 2 vs Steam Deck: The Honest Comparison

At £395, the Switch 2 sits in direct price competition with the Steam Deck LCD (£349) and very close to the Steam Deck OLED (£479). This comparison comes up constantly and it’s worth working through carefully, because the two machines serve meaningfully different audiences despite being in the same price bracket.

We’ve written at length about whether the Steam Deck is worth it for retro gaming over dedicated handhelds, and the conclusion there applies here too: the Steam Deck is an extraordinary piece of kit for a certain kind of player, and a slightly overwhelming one for another. If you want access to your entire Steam library, including decades of PC gaming history and an enormous catalogue of indie games, the Steam Deck makes that possible in a handheld form factor. It’s also considerably more capable as a retro emulation device, running everything from Atari up through PS2 and PSP with relative ease.

For the casual player who grew up on Nintendo games and wants to play Nintendo games, though, the Steam Deck is an irrelevant competitor. It doesn’t run Switch games. It doesn’t run Mario Kart World. It doesn’t have Nintendo’s first-party software, which remains the most consistently brilliant output of any platform holder in the industry. You can’t emulate your way to playing a game that was released last month.

Our broader comparison of Steam Deck versus dedicated retro handhelds in 2025 is worth a read if you’re genuinely torn, but the short version for this audience is: if Nintendo games are why you’re interested in a Switch 2, no alternative scratches that itch. If Nintendo games are just one reason among several and you want the widest possible gaming library, the Steam Deck deserves serious consideration.

The Real Cost of Switch 2 Ownership: Games, Accessories, and Online

The £395 headline price is not the total cost of owning a Nintendo Switch 2, and pretending otherwise would be doing you a disservice. The full financial picture looks considerably different once you account for everything you’ll actually need or want.

Game prices: the elephant in the room

Switch 2 first-party games launch at £59.99. That is not a misprint. Mario Kart World is £59.99 if you buy it separately. That’s more expensive than PlayStation 5 first-party games at launch (typically £69.99, but regularly discounted to £49.99 or below within months). It’s more than the Switch 1 ever charged for first-party titles (£49.99 was the ceiling). And Nintendo’s first-party games are famously resistant to significant price drops — five-year-old Switch titles still retail at £40-£50 on the eShop with some regularity.

For a casual player who might buy three or four games a year, the per-game premium is manageable but it’s real. Budget around £60 per major title and don’t expect Black Friday to rescue you the way it would on PlayStation or Xbox.

Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack

To play online — including online multiplayer in Mario Kart World — you need a Nintendo Switch Online subscription. The individual plan costs £34.99 per year for the basic tier or £39.99 per year for the Expansion Pack, which adds access to a library of N64, Mega Drive, and Game Boy games (among others) through the NSO app. For the casual player who grew up on those consoles, the Expansion Pack is genuinely worth considering — it’s essentially a curated retro library bundled into your subscription cost.

The family membership (up to eight accounts) runs £59.99 per year for basic or £69.99 for Expansion Pack, which is excellent value if you have a household of Switch users. One subscription covers everyone.

MicroSD Express cards: a necessary extra cost

The Switch 2 has 256GB of internal storage, which is substantially better than the original Switch’s 32GB embarrassment, but Switch 2 games are larger than Switch 1 games, and 256GB fills up faster than you’d think. The Switch 2 requires MicroSD Express cards rather than standard MicroSD cards, and at launch those were both rare and expensive — expect to pay £40-£80 for a decent 512GB card. Standard MicroSD cards don’t work. This isn’t advertised loudly enough and it’s a genuine gotcha for anyone who assumed their existing cards would carry over.

The real first-year cost for a new Switch 2 owner

  • Console: £395.99
  • Mario Kart World (if not bundled): £59.99
  • One additional game: £59.99
  • Nintendo Switch Online (individual, Expansion Pack): £39.99
  • 512GB MicroSD Express card: £60 (approximate)
  • Total: approximately £615

That’s before a second controller (£59.99 for a standalone Joy-Con 2, or £79.99 for a Pro Controller 2), before any game-specific accessories, and before any additional software. For a genuinely casual player who will use this machine moderately, you’re looking at £600+ in year one. That’s a significant sum and it deserves to be said plainly.

What the Switch 2 Does Brilliantly That Nothing Else Does

I’ve been relatively critical so far because I think the price warrants scrutiny, but I also want to be honest about what the Switch 2 genuinely does better than any alternative, because it does several things brilliantly.

The hybrid concept, now fully matured

The original Switch’s hybrid concept — a home console that becomes a handheld — was the most genuinely clever hardware idea in gaming since the Game Boy. I remember thinking when it launched in 2017 that it would either be the most transformative thing Nintendo had done since the Wii or it would be a gimmick that nobody used properly after the first fortnight. It turned out to be the former, decisively. The ability to start a session on the TV, pick up the console, pull out the Joy-Cons, and continue playing on the sofa or the kitchen table or the train — without losing progress, without a loading screen, without any friction whatsoever — changed how I personally relate to gaming.

The Switch 2 refines this to near-perfection. The transition between docked and handheld is instant. The larger screen means handheld mode now genuinely feels like a proper gaming experience rather than a compromise. The new kickstand — a full-width, adjustable hinge rather than the original’s laughable little plastic tab — means tabletop mode is actually usable. These sound like incremental improvements and they are, but incremental improvements to a fundamentally great concept add up.

The social and multiplayer experience

There is no console better than the Nintendo Switch family for local multiplayer. This was true in 2017 and it remains true in 2025. The Joy-Con 2 controllers detach and function as two separate controllers, meaning the console ships with local two-player capability for certain games out of the box. Mario Kart World supports four players locally with four sets of Joy-Cons. The GameChat feature, while not groundbreaking, is the first time Nintendo has offered video chat with the console itself rather than requiring a separate app on a phone.

If you have children who play games, or if you regularly game with a partner or friends in the same room, the Switch 2 is the only modern console that makes local multiplayer feel genuinely effortless and fun. PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X are perfectly capable of local multiplayer but it’s never felt like a priority for either platform in the way it clearly does for Nintendo.

Nintendo’s first-party library: still the best in the business

I will defend this position against all comers: Nintendo’s first-party output, across their major franchises, is the most consistently high-quality software from any platform holder. Not every game is perfect, but the floor is remarkably high. Zelda, Mario, Metroid, Pikmin, Splatoon, Animal Crossing, Fire Emblem, Xenoblade — the breadth and depth of their internal studios’ output is genuinely unmatched. PlayStation has its own brilliant exclusives, but Sony’s output has become increasingly focused on big-budget cinematic single-player experiences. Nintendo makes everything, for everyone, at a quality level that never really slips.

For the person who grew up on the SNES or the N64, there’s also a continuity of design philosophy that’s genuinely moving to experience. The same fundamental values that made Super Mario World feel like pure joy in 1992 are visible in Mario Kart World in 2025. That’s not nostalgia talking — it’s an observation about design principles that have been refined over decades and remain relevant.

The Retro Gaming Angle: What Does This Mean for People Like Us?

Here’s where I want to get specifically personal, because this is RetroInHand and we’re not just a general gaming audience. We’re people who care about the history of this medium, who might spend a Saturday afternoon cleaning oxidised PAL SNES cartridge contacts as happily as we’d spend it playing a new release, who find genuine value in understanding where games came from as much as where they’re going.

For us, the Switch 2 decision has an extra dimension. The Nintendo Switch Online Expansion Pack includes a retro library that currently covers NES, SNES, Game Boy, Game Boy Colour, Game Boy Advance, N64, and Mega Drive games. It’s imperfect — the N64 library remains stubbornly incomplete, the Mega Drive selection is decent but not exhaustive, and the emulation quality has historically been uneven — but for someone who wants a curated, legally obtained retro library on a modern piece of hardware, it’s not nothing.

The more interesting question is how the Switch 2 sits alongside dedicated retro hardware. I’m someone who owns a working PAL Mega Drive, a SNES with a proper RGB setup, and a handful of Game Boys in various states of repair. I’m also someone who knows exactly how to play PAL Game Boy games on a modern TV without a Game Boy Player, because I enjoy the process of making old hardware work in modern contexts. For people like me, the Switch 2’s retro offerings are supplementary rather than primary.

But I’m aware that not everyone shares that particular flavour of obsession. There are plenty of people who loved gaming in the 80s and 90s, who have genuine affection for those games and consoles, but who don’t particularly want to maintain physical hardware or troubleshoot PAL Atari 2600 connections to modern TVs. For those people, the Switch 2 with an Expansion Pack subscription is actually a reasonable and convenient entry point to playing some of those older games on modern hardware, even if it’s not the purist option.

There’s also something worth saying about the broader cultural moment we’re in with gaming. The games and consoles we grew up with are being recognised — in museums, in streaming adaptations, in cultural commentary — as genuinely important artefacts. The question of what modern Nintendo means to people who came up with older Nintendo is partly a question about continuity and partly a question about whether the medium’s current form speaks to us in the way it once did. For me, the Switch 2 does. It has that quality — harder to define than resolution or frame rate — of making you want to pick it up. That’s rarer than it sounds.

Should You Wait? The Case for Patience

I’ve been broadly positive about the Switch 2 as a machine, but there’s a real argument for waiting that I’d be irresponsible not to make clearly.

First: the MicroSD Express card situation will improve. Prices will come down and availability will increase. By Christmas 2025, the premium for Switch 2 storage should be substantially lower than it is at launch.

Second: the game library will grow. Right now, with Mario Kart World as the headline title, there are perhaps three or four games that make the hardware genuinely exciting. By the end of 2025, with Donkey Kong Bananza, Metroid Prime 4, and additional third-party titles in the mix, that calculation looks considerably better. By the end of 2026, the Switch 2 library will likely be as rich as the Switch 1 library was at its peak.

Third: there will almost certainly be a hardware revision. Nintendo’s pattern is consistent: an original launch model, followed within two or three years by a revised version. Sometimes that’s an OLED screen upgrade (as happened with the Switch), sometimes it’s a Lite version for handheld-only play, sometimes it’s a performance improvement. If you wait two years, you might get a better screen, a lighter form factor, or lower manufacturing costs reflected in the price.

Fourth: first-party game prices occasionally — rarely, but occasionally — drop. Super Mario Odyssey briefly hit £30 during a Nintendo eShop sale. Patient buyers sometimes benefit.

The counter-argument is simply: if you want it now and can afford it now, there’s no shame in buying it now. Life is finite, summers with kids playing Mario Kart are finite, and “waiting for the perfect moment” is a way of not enjoying things you genuinely want. I don’t say that to encourage reckless spending — I say it because I’ve met too many people who spent years waiting for the “right time” to buy something they’d have loved, and by the time they got around to it, the moment had passed.

The Verdict: Who Should Buy the Nintendo Switch 2 at £395?

Let me be specific, because vague verdicts help nobody.

You should buy it if:

  • You have children who play games, or you regularly play games with friends or family in the same room. Nothing beats the Switch 2 for this.
  • You already have a Switch library you love and the prospect of those games running better, loading faster, and looking sharper is genuinely exciting to you.
  • You don’t currently own any Nintendo hardware and you want access to Nintendo’s first-party games — the Zeldas, the Marios, the games that exist nowhere else.
  • You play in short sessions — an hour here, twenty minutes there — and value a console that supports that rhythm without friction.
  • You have £395 to spend without significant financial stress and games are something you genuinely love. Life’s too short for false economies on things that bring you real joy.

You should wait if:

  • You currently own a Switch OLED and are broadly happy with it. The upgrade isn’t urgent, and the screen is arguably better on the older machine.
  • The £395 + ongoing costs would genuinely strain your budget. A Switch OLED at current market prices (around £250-£270 new) or even a Switch Lite (around £199 new) remains an excellent option with an enormous library.
  • You’re hoping the launch lineup will expand before you commit. It will, demonstrably, and within six months the software case for the hardware will be considerably stronger.
  • You’re primarily interested in retro gaming and the Switch 2’s retro offerings feel incidental rather than central. A Trimui Smart Pro, an FPGA device, or a Steam Deck will serve that interest more directly — the comparison between budget options in this space is worth reading before you commit.

You probably shouldn’t buy it if:

  • You’re not specifically interested in Nintendo’s games. The third-party library is improving but not yet compelling enough to justify the price over a PlayStation 5 or Steam Deck for non-Nintendo-specific content.
  • You primarily play one type of game — first-person shooters, sports simulations, fighting games — where the Switch 2 is at best an average option.
  • You’re thinking of it primarily as a retro emulation device. It’s not the right tool for that job at this price point.

The Bigger Picture: What £395 Means in the Context of Gaming Culture in 2025

I want to end with something that isn’t strictly a purchasing recommendation, because I think the Switch 2’s price point raises questions that are worth sitting with.

Gaming has become expensive in a way that deserves acknowledgement rather than just acceptance. When I think about the reader who grew up with a PAL SNES and a stack of cartridges — probably twenty or thirty games over the entire lifecycle of the machine, bought carefully, swapped with friends, rented from the video shop on Friday nights — the economics of modern gaming are genuinely alien. A single Switch 2 game at launch costs more than several SNES cartridges would have in 1993. The annual cost of Nintendo Switch Online is more than a year’s worth of a magazine subscription, which itself was the community infrastructure that kept retro gaming cultures alive before the internet made that redundant.

None of this is unique to Nintendo. PlayStation 5 games cost £70 at launch. Xbox Game Pass has restructured how people think about game ownership in ways that are simultaneously brilliant and unsettling. The mobile gaming industry has perfected the art of making free things that extract money from people who didn’t plan to spend any. The economics of gaming have changed fundamentally and are continuing to change.

What Nintendo offers, at £395, is something relatively rare in modern gaming: a clear transaction. You buy the hardware, you buy the games, you own them. There’s no subscription required to access the single-player content. There’s no battle pass, no cosmetic store, no artificial scarcity creating FOMO. The game you buy on cartridge will work on this hardware for as long as the hardware functions. That’s not a revolutionary statement — it’s how things worked before the industry discovered recurring revenue — but in 2025 it feels almost quaint, and there’s something to be said for it.

The people who grew up understanding that PAL cartridge pricing works differently to NTSC because physical media has real, traceable economics — those people understand instinctively that ownership matters. A cartridge you can hold is a different kind of thing from a licence you rent. The Switch 2 still makes that possible, and in 2025, that’s worth something.

Is the Nintendo Switch 2 worth £395 for casual UK gamers in 2025? For the right person, unequivocally yes. It’s the most polished, thoughtfully designed, genuinely joyful gaming machine I’ve used in years. It plays to Nintendo’s historic strengths — accessibility, local multiplayer, a first-party library without equal — and it does so on hardware that finally feels proportionate to those ambitions.

But it’s £395, and that’s real money. Know what you’re buying it for. Be honest with yourself about how much you’ll play it. Factor in the full cost of ownership. And if the answer is still yes — if you’re picturing Tuesday evenings on the sofa with the kickstand up, or a family Mario Kart session that ends with everyone arguing happily about the blue shell — then go and buy it without guilt. You’ve thought it through. That’s enough.