Editor's Note: Our review of the Nintendo Switch 2 console is currently in progress, as well as our review of Mario Kart World and review updates for games like Breath of the Wild.
Let’s be frank here: It’s kind of strange that we even have to review Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour. This is essentially an interactive user manual, and it has big “pack-in game” energy coursing through every line of its code. But Welcome Tour isn’t a free bonus. An inexplicable $10 price tag means that you, a new or prospective Switch 2 owner, are forced to ask the question of not only whether it’s worth your time to run around this digital gallery of micro-sized minigames, nifty tech demos, and trivial trivia booths, but also your money. And while there are a few chuckles to be quietly snorted out, and some behind-the-scenes factoids that left me slightly above whelmed, I ended up wishing I had learned about all the cool things my new game system can do by actually playing a game on it rather than flipping through a series of marketing-approved PowerPoint presentations.
To its credit, a lot of care and attention has clearly gone into making Welcome Tour the nicest brochure it can be. It’s sleek and shiny in the way Nintendo games often are, and there’s a surprising amount to it as you travel across giant versions of nearly every official piece of Switch 2 hardware that is available at launch. Styling this environment like some sort of Nintendo-themed Apple Store full of badge-wearing employees is a strangely sterile choice when compared to stuff like the celebratory theme park of the Wii U’s Nintendo Land or the adventurous spaceship of the PlayStation 5’s Astro’s Playroom, but it is one that has at least been executed to the best of its intent.
There are four main types of activities as you explore: Collecting stamps at podiums that mark each point of interest on the accessory you are currently on, messing with tech demos that show off some neat little feature of the Switch 2, playing minigames that similarly flaunt the new tricks it has up its sleeve but with a more tangible goal or score to try and beat, and finally reading up at information desks that teach you a bit about a certain aspect of the console (and then have you parrot it back as part of a comically easy quiz). You’ll earn medals as you complete these tasks, and some activities are gated behind having a certain amount, turning Welcome Tour into one big checklist to slowly tick off.
The problem, however, is that you’re never given a compelling reason why you would try for 100% completion beyond the desire to say you did. Apart from the joy of learning, the chase is the entire pitch, because Welcome Tour is mostly just busywork outside of the minigames. The stamp collecting is the best example of this, as you can’t go to the next area until you’ve found all of the stamp podiums in the current one. Annoyingly, those podiums are invisible until you approach them, and stumbling upon one for something like the little rubber nubs a Joy-Con would rest on in the grip accessory isn’t exactly riveting stuff. It wasn’t uncommon for me to spend the last minute or so of each area aimlessly sweeping the level for the one invisible podium I’d missed before I could move on.
More enticing are the tech demos and minigames, which range from mediocre to fairly entertaining – but most fall somewhere in the realm of that meme of Bender from Futurama saying “neat,” taking a picture, and then immediately moving on. The tech demos are cool because they can sometimes allow you to slip behind the curtain in an interesting way, giving you precise control over the strength of the rumble in your controllers or letting you compare the effects of Super Resolution upscaling side-by-side. The coolest of them is probably the ability to play World 1-1 from the original Super Mario Bros. at one-to-one pixel scale on a 4K TV, which fits the entire stage on screen at once. I don’t really get why Nintendo stopped short and didn’t just make the rest of Super Mario Bros. playable this way too, but still: Neat.
The minigames are more hit and miss, and usually ask you to get certain scores or times to earn medals and unlock harder versions of them. That could be using the new Joy-Con mouse controls to pilot a UFO to avoid spiked balls, playing a matching game based on rumble alone, or contorting your face in front of a connected USB camera (if you have one) to match a series of expressions with inconsistent results. Some of these are pretty fun and occasionally even a satisfying challenge, like a speed golf game that demands precision with the mouse controls. However, others are borderline laughable. Two different options literally have you pixel hunting, while another has you slowly scraping paint off of a flat surface, and not in a satisfying Powerwash Simulator sort of way.
A lot of these feel like the first draft of a Mario Party minigame that didn’t quite make the cut: Entertaining for a second, or a cute way to show off a new thing the Switch 2 can do, but instantly forgettable in how thin they are. Again, this is one big tech demo in a shiny package, so it makes sense that we aren’t getting a WarioWare level of finished quality here or whatever. But demos are traditionally a free thing meant to convince you to buy something bigger. Selling Welcome Tour on its own sets expectations it just never tries to live up to.
When you do find a minigame that is a slightly more enticing endeavour, like that UFO one, Welcome Tour’s completionist mentality can often get in its own way. It will sometimes halt my enthusiasm for a game by arbitrarily blocking me from taking on its harder levels until I’ve gone off and collected more medals – sometimes a lot more – by doing something less fun. (And you better own a 4K TV, USB camera, and either a Pro Controller 2 or Joy-Con 2 Charging Grip, otherwise you’ll be stuck with the silver medals you earn by using a cheat code to skip certain uncompletable attractions.) So while there are a few nuggets of good ideas scattered about, none are really a repeatable draw on their own that might make me want to start Welcome Tour up again one day.
I have to give the minigames credit, though, because at least those give you something decently amusing to spend your time on. The quizzes, on the other hand, are so uninteresting that I eventually started walking right past some of them altogether. Little information kiosks can be found all over Welcome Tour, each sharing a series of slideshows about a different Switch 2 topic. Maybe that’s the mechanics of the new Joy-Con’s HD Rumble, joysticks, or magnetic attachments. Perhaps one will teach you about the cooling tech built into the new dock, or the stand on the official USB camera peripheral. No matter the subject, you can read up on each and then take a brief, pointlessly easy quiz on what you just read for no other reason than to get a checkmark and say you did. It’s roughly equivalent to paying money to do a second grader’s homework for them.
I can’t say it’s all tedious, because occasionally you will get an interesting bit of insight into how a specific piece of the Switch 2 functions, or why something was designed a certain way. Seeing how HD Rumble physically works is actually very cool, and learning that just one of the rubber feet on the dock has a little plastic section so that it stays put when you want it to, but is also more likely to slide rather than fall if a cable is tugged, is some genuinely fascinating insight into how much Nintendo’s engineers thought about every aspect of its design. But more often, what you’ll get instead is vapid, surface-level information where the important fact you’ll need to remember for the quiz is something like, “Nintendo Controllers have had control sticks for a very long time.” (Seriously, that’s a real one. Make sure you study up.)
I think these frustrate me so much because they feel like a missed opportunity. There are so many quiz desks, and I can count the number of times they elicited any emotion at all from me on one hand. Welcome Tour has you physically crawling into the system and walking along its circuit boards at certain points and, while it will tell you about why the Switch 2 has more capacitors than the original or how each Joy-Con has a computer built into it, it does so with all the intrigue and depth of a middle school science fair project. This was such a prime opportunity to truly document the design process behind this device, or dig into Nintendo’s hardware history in a more nuanced way, or just have a little more fun with it in general. Instead, you only get glimpses of that promise buried in what feels like pre-approved marketing copy that you’d be more likely to find in a press release than one of the only two first-party launch games.
The end result of all this is a museum without much of interest to teach you, a user manual that’s not very convenient to read, and a game that’s not all that fun to play. That might sound harsh, and it’s true that if Welcome Tour had been a bundled inclusion (or, at the very least, a perk included as part of your Nintendo Online membership) I probably wouldn’t be holding its feet quite as close to the fire. But as a “game” you have to buy, it’s hard to recommend what’s here to anyone except the most diehard of Nintendo fans – and even then, it’s good for little more than a day or so of taking photos like Bender.
