Switch 2 launched in June 2025 and, although a young console in the scheme of things, it’s already built up a sizeable software library, mixing some choice exclusives with a host of ‘Nintendo Switch 2 Editions’, which include optimised, improved versions of some of the greatest video games ever made.
But what are the best games for Nintendo Switch 2 available? Which Switch 2 games are must-haves? What should you play first?
With Hollow Knight: Silksong’s huge launch in full swing, community debate about its qualities and flaws has gone back and forth, with some players insisting their criticisms about things like the game’s difficulty are valid and shouldn’t be instantly dismissed as “hate.”
Silksong launched over six years after it was announced amid huge excitement, and early indications are that it’s a critical and commercial success. At the time of this article’s publication, the Steam concurrent player count was over half a million, with English language user reviews sat on a ‘Very Positive’ rating.
However, as more players work their way through the game, some are expressing criticism across social media, subreddits, Discords, and Steam reviews. Most of this criticism revolves around Silksong’s difficulty scaling, which is causing players problems, and brutal runbacks. There’s even one very early miniboss causing a lot of players a whole heap of trouble, too.
“Is it just me, or are some of the things that make Silksong ‘difficult’ just cruel?” wondered redditor Machi-Ato.
“The game has artificially inflated difficulty and playtime due to overtuned numbers and menial tasks/runback,” reads a post on Steam.
It’s the reaction to these sorts of criticisms that has sparked a debate within the gaming community. Take that Steam post, for example. “Maybe you just got older and your skills have declined,” is the first response.
I love reading the negative reviews of Silksong because its just people complaining the game is too hard and doesn’t baby them pic.twitter.com/65Fv9lBtAx
“It’s okay that Silksong is hard,” declared redditor jacked-deMamp in a thread upvoted 1,400 times. “It’s already getting old seeing that every other post online about this game is someone complaining about the difficulty, especially when there are so many incredible things to talk about like the quest system and the new mechanics.
“The amount of love Team Cherry put into this game is insane and you can feel it when you play, I wish people would get over the fact that it’s challenging because there’s nothing you can do about it other than get better. The game is finally out, and it’s hard – just like the original. I personally love that the mechanics are so different and require a lot of learning again, because after playing hundreds of hours of HK I didn’t want to just breeze through Silksong.
“I think we just need to realize the game is the way it is and cherish these early days with a very special piece of art. It’s okay to get frustrated but don’t make those feelings overshadow how great of an experience this game is.”
This sentiment has pushed the debate even further, with some players pushing back against the “git gud” and “skill issue” comments to insist it’s perfectly fine to point out flaws in Silksong, however, beloved and important a release it may be.
“Criticism isn’t hate,” countered redditor bboy2812 in a thread upvoted 5,200 times. “Most of the criticism I’ve seen on here and the Steam discussions is consistently dismissed as hate. Bad rosary economy, insane difficulty scaling, very few meaningful unlocks/upgrades, runbacks, locked into fighting bosses, contact damage stacking with normal hits, etc.
“The only ‘hate’ I’ve seen are from people who spam ‘git gud’ and ‘skill issue’ whenever they encounter valid complaints against their perfect little game that cannot possibly have anything wrong with it.”
If this sounds familiar, it’s perhaps because we’ve been through this sort of debate multiple times before with FromSoftware’s Souls games. The typical ‘Souls Cycle’ usually kicks off with adulation, followed by complaints the game is too hard, then more insight into why they’re too hard, then the ‘git gud’ accusations. Silksong, it seems, is following the same path.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
Greetings, and welcome to another edition of Box Art Brawl!
Last time, we checked out the original Harvest Moon for the SNES, and would you believe it, it was actually the more realistic European design that won the day with 46% of the vote. North America was the runner-up with 34%, while Japan only managed 20%.
Dragon Quest I & II HD-2D Remake launches for the Switch and Switch 2 next month, and to build some excitement, Square Enix has now released an extensive gameplay overview trailer.
Over seven minutes, you can get a better look at the game’s exploration, combat, party lineup and more in the “stunning new versions” of these classics. It follows on from the development team announcing the game had gone gold last week.
Earlier this week, Ubisoft began its 30th anniversary celebrations for its famous video game mascot Rayman.
Apart from the news he’ll be returning at some point in the future (with work on a new project now underway), Ubisoft is planning to reflect on the character’s career with behind-the-scenes information, anecdotes, developer interviews, concept art and “more”.
The Switch 2 allows you to play your existing Switch library, but not every Switch game works perfectly out of the box.
Fortunately, Nintendo has been rolling out regular firmware updates to help improve this, and following yesterday’s major system update (bumping the Switch 2 up to Version 20.4.0), a handful of games are now running as intended.
It looks like Bethesda has begun teasing new content for Starfield, after fans spotted a hidden message in a social media video released to celebrate the game’s two-year anniversary.
The video, below, starts off innocently enough, but soon the tone of the music shifts and the image becomes garbled. Clearly, there’s a tease in there somewhere!
Celebrating two incredible years in the #Starfield. 🌌
Thank you to everyone who has explored the Settled Systems with us. We look forward to the adventures yet to come. pic.twitter.com/AeWN8DVlO2
And indeed there is. It didn’t take long for Starfield fans to arrange the frames in such a way to form the words ‘Terran Armada,’ which has sent the game’s community down a rabbit hole of speculation.
The most obvious suggestion is Terran Armada is the name of Starfield’s long-awaited second expansion. If so, it suggests a DLC that revolves around Earth, people who left Earth, or people who still are on Earth. Some are speculating that Terran Armada, if this does in fact relate to DLC, will be about the return ships that left Earth at some point in the past, perhaps a fleet of generation ships. Another popular theory is that the Terrans are the name of a new enemy faction of survivors left on Earth after its destruction, which could evoke Mad Max vibes.
In Starfield, Earth became a barren, uninhabitable wasteland after its magnetosphere collapsed in 2203, leading to the dissipation of its atmosphere and the evacuation of humanity. The collapse was a direct consequence of the invention and widespread use of the Grav Drive, a technology enabling faster-than-light travel. The planet is now exposed to dangerous solar and cosmic radiation and is covered in toxic vents and impact craters, with no signs of life.
Or perhaps Terran Armada isn’t DLC 2 after all, and instead is a stop-gap update designed to tide fans over until the promised second expansion finally materializes.
Whatever this is, clearly Starfield fans who have stuck with the game since its launch in 2023 are chomping at the bit. Apart from vague words of reassurance, Bethesda has remained tight-lipped on the future of Starfield, only recently teasing improvements to space travel.
“We’ve waited 11 months for a three-second screen that changed colors and revealed a few letters of a broken up word (and we’re probably gonna have to wait another 4-6 months for anything more),” said redditor Elkupalos. “We’re beyond starved at this point haha. Next trailer or update of actual substance is gonna hit us fans like a nuke.”
Last month, Bethesda confirmed improvements to Starfield space gameplay “to make the travels there more rewarding” after datamined fragments of code suggested the developer had a more streamlined space travel experience in the works. Based on this datamine, while you may be able to travel between planets within the same system, you won’t be able to fly all the way between systems, nor fly directly from a planet’s surface into orbit, like No Man’s Sky.
In a new video discussing his career, veteran Bethesda developer Tim Lamb confirmed that the studio had been working on Starfield’s space gameplay, and that a new DLC story was still coming at some point.
“I think as it comes to Starfield, I’m really excited for players to see what the teams have been working on,” he said. “We have some cool stuff coming, including free updates and features the players have been asking for, as well as a new DLC story.
“I can’t go into all the details just yet, but I will say part of the team has been focused on space gameplay to make the travels there more rewarding. We’re also adding some new game systems, and a few other smaller delights. There’s also some really interesting stuff coming down the pipe from our verified creators. There’s some fun stuff.
“I just want to say thanks. We really appreciate the support and the enthusiasm. We can’t wait to get it into the hands of our players.”
Starfield launched in September 2023 as Bethesda’s first brand new IP in 25 years, but it was not as well received as the studio’s previous games in the Fallout and The Elder Scrolls franchises, and the Shattered Space expansion, released a year later in September 2024, has a ‘mostly negative’ user review rating on Steam.
Starfield went on to reach 15 million players, but the question of whether Bethesda might walk away from the game to focus on its other franchises has been a running theme since release. In June 2024, Bethesda insisted it remained committed to supporting Starfield, and confirmed at least one other story expansion would come out following Shattered Space. And in an interview with YouTube channel MrMattyPlays, Bethesda Game Studios’ Todd Howard said the developer was aiming to release an annual story expansion for “hopefully a very long time.”
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
Fallout studio Bethesda Softworks has been through a lot in the last few decades, and former marketing boss Pete Hines was there to see it through almost all of its changes.
Hines touched on how Bethesda became a gaming giant during a recent interview with DBLTAP. In addition to providing his perspective on the company’s early days, he took the time to recount how some of its biggest victories and hardest falls helped shape it into what it is today.
When it was working, it was magical.
Hines started with Bethesda in October 1999, seeing it through everything from the launch of The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind in 2002, to Skyrim in 2011, to Fallout 76 in 2018. He also remained as a key figure at the gaming publisher throughout Microsoft’s acquisition of Bethesda parent company ZeniMax Media, which was completed in 2021, before going on to announce his retirement in 2023.
Hines brought his time at Bethesda to an end after 24 years. However, it seems it was the quieter moments working with ZeniMax founder and CEO Robert Altman, who passed away in 2021, that he remembers most fondly.
“It was Robert Altman’s company, and we were his employees, no question,” Hines said. “But he treated us more like family, and we found a culture that really fit us. When it was working, it was magical. We were a small, private company. It’s way easier to stay out of scrutiny when you’re not having to put your earnings reports out for the whole world.”
Bethesda, which now serves under the titan that is Microsoft, encompasses a variety of different game studios. This includes its development arm, Bethesda Game Studios, Doom developer id Software, Deathloop developer Arkane Studios, Wolfenstein studio MachineGames, and The Elder Scrolls Online studio ZeniMax Online.
There’s just no question that the company is not the same.
Bethesda has gone through major shifts both before and after the Microsoft acquisition. For better or worse, Hines says there’s no denying the company he started at in 1999 has changed.
“There’s just no question that the company is not the same,” he added. “It has been radically changed and altered from the company that we built. It is what it is. Things change. Things move on, but at its height, it was really a special thing to be a part of.”
Michael Cripe is a freelance writer with IGN. He’s best known for his work at sites like The Pitch, The Escapist, and OnlySP. Be sure to give him a follow on Bluesky (@mikecripe.bsky.social) and Twitter (@MikeCripe).
BOKURA: planet is a two-player, two-device-only co-op game that launched on Switch and Switch 2 on 7th August.
A follow-up to 2023’s BOKURA, indie developer tokoronyori says of the first game that he “kept wondering what scenery I might have seen if I’d gone in the complete opposite direction…In the end, I couldn’t hold back. I ran the other way, which is how BOKURA: planet was born, and the view here is incredible.”
Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 publisher Paradox is now offering PlayStation Store pre-order refunds as it makes “big changes” after a backlash to its decision to lock clans behind DLC.
The furore began with the confirmation that Bloodlines 2 would feature four clans: Brujah; Tremere; Banu Haqim; and Ventrue. While this selection provides four different starting options for how you build your protagonist, it’s a more limited offering compared to the cult classic original Bloodlines, which featured seven clans.
Developer The Chinese Room added a further two clans to Bloodlines 2 (Lasombra and Toreador), but these were only available as part of the Shadows and Silk add-on pack, which costs $21.99 as DLC, or included as part of the $89.99 Premium Edition. The standard edition costs $59.99.
This DLC is available from day one, which has created the impression that the “full” roster has been carved up, with only those paying extra getting the complete launch experience. As you’d expect, fans were quick to express their dissatisfaction.
At gamescom 2025, a representative for publisher Paradox told IGN the decision was a “business” informed choice, prompting further outcry. Then, last month, a post on Discord from Paradox suggested a significant change would be coming ahead of launch, and now the publisher has gone one step further by issuing PlayStation Store pre-order refunds.
“PS Store pre-orders will be refunded on Sept 8. You’ll be able to pre-order again before launch on Oct 21.
“Thanks for your patience; we’ll share more soon!”
Fans are now wondering whether Paradox will include Lasombra and Toreador by default and not as DLC at base game price. Certainly, the sentiment online is that’s the expectation.
“Honestly nothing short of fully including them at base game price will turn me around on this,” said one social media user in response to the announcement. “Otherwise I’m skipping.”
“The only way to salvage this and regain trust with the community is to sell the base game as-is with all clans available and rather sell DLC with new side stories and cosmetics on the side or just add the cosmetics/side stories as part of a higher tier eg deluxe edition/premium edition, as that won’t mess with the main story/narrative etc,” said another.
Some expressed thanks for the reaction to the backlash. “I’m very excited and hopeful to see what you came up with for the two clans locked behind DLC issue,” said one fan. “I’d like to thank you for listening to community feedback and working to fix the issue. I’m sure refunding store pre-orders was not an easy decision.”
Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 has suffered a difficult development and a number of high-profile delays, but it is a crucial release for Paradox. The publisher will be keen to give it the best chance possible to succeed, and backtracking on its DLC plans may be the only viable option at this stage. While you wait to find out, check out IGN’s Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 hands-on preview.
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Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
