Top Switch 2 Visual Upgrades and Ports Worth Honorable Mention

Multiple Switch 2 releases demonstrated impressive graphical improvements, expanded environments, and refined lighting techniques despite hardware limitations.

Hardware by Tanvir Kabbo on Dec 22, 2025

A group of titles that look nice but didn't quite make it into the top 10. They nevertheless deserve respect for their artistic and technical skills. These games show off smart engine development, high-performance ambitions, and imaginative ways to get around the limits of the hardware.

Kirby Air Riders

We gave Kirby Air Riders an honorable mention for making several interesting yet useful technical decisions. Using Bandai Namco's new Soul Avis engine, designed for open-world and large-scale games, this collection of quasi-racing, quasi-party, and quasi-minigames delivers startling results.

Top Switch 2, Visual Upgrades, Ports Worth, Honorable Mention, NoobFeed

We saw great camera work, powerful environmental art, and tremendous particle effects. For a Switch 2 game, the graphics are good, and the game runs at 60 fps except for the City Trial and split-screen parts.

Even when the screen is split, the developers do their best to keep the frame rate at 60 fps, even though it sometimes drops. The game always offers new perspectives and visual concepts, thanks to its many gameplay modes and camera positions.

The main problem is HDR, which we thought was poorly done, and most players probably won't like. The experience is also seamless, sleek, and pleasing to the eye.

Mario Kart World

We also talked about Mario Kart World, which was the first game in the series to take the series' usual style and expand it into a larger world. We liked how the sense of size improved as you got closer, with big buildings visible in the background.

The developers came up with innovative solutions, including a cube map that updates itself for water reflections instead of using SSR. This doesn't stretch the limits, though. The end result is a solid, high-quality visual that works nicely with the game.

Its changing time-of-day mechanism is a great compromise. The game doesn't fully simulate lighting and weather situations.

Instead, it switches between four pre-baked lighting states and sun positions, with real-time shadows that don't always align with the sun. It's easy to use, works well, and is surprisingly convincing as long as you don't look too carefully at the transitions between the sun and the moon.

Switch 2 Enhancements of Previous Titles

Many older titles got major updates on Switch 2, making them feel new again. Some of these are Super Mario Odyssey, Breath of the Wild, Tears of the Kingdom, Echoes of Wisdom, Link's Awakening, and Kirby and the Forgotten Land. In several cases, we saw tripled resolutions, stable performance, and doubled frame rates. For example, Splatoon 3 went from 30 fps to 60 fps in city sections.

Panic Button helped make four of these games better: Super Mario Odyssey, Super Mario Bros. U, Super Mario 3D World, plus Bowser's Fury, and Arms. These changes made the experience substantially better for people who didn't buy new software for their Switch2.

Top Switch 2, Visual Upgrades, Ports Worth, Honorable Mention, NoobFeed

Star Wars Outlaws on Switch 2

Star Wars Outlaws is another important name to remember. The Switch 2 version wouldn't have made it into the top 10, but the transfer is so good that it deserves recognition.

We thought it was amazing that a difficult open-world game with ray tracing, which was already hard on mid-range PCs with Series-level hardware, worked well on the Switch 2, which is designed for mobile devices.

Massive kept the game's indirect lighting and dense world detail, both of which were ray-traced. The game runs at 30 fps with good visual quality thanks to DLSS. It is also one of the few games using hardware-based ray tracing currently available on Switch 2. The results are really good for a title of this size.

Fast Fusion

Shinnen's Fast Fusion almost made it into the top 10, but it didn't because of worries over image quality. Even while the fundamentals are good, the graphics aren't as clear as they should be, and occasionally they look worse than the team's last Switch game.

Part of the problem is the "Tiny DLSS" implementation, which looks great when the screen is still, but falls apart when it moves. That problem is inescapable in a racing game with fast speeds.

Still, the other images are great. The bigger engine works well in broad open areas rather than just high tracks. The quality of the shaders, effects, lighting, and indirect lighting is really good. It's an incredible presentation, but it has some structural issues. This game would get an honorary number 11 place if there were one.

Final Thoughts

These honorable mentions show that Switch 2 development is strengthening and that studios are developing more imaginative engineering solutions. Even though they are impressive, they are still outside the top 10, which means there is an opportunity for titles that went even further.

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