Cyberpunk 2077 is, in a lot of ways, a showcase of the Nintendo Switch 2’s power over its predecessor. Here we have a big, open world game that used high-quality visuals and struggled to run at launch on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One at the time, leaving the Nintendo Switch in a limbo when it came to receiving a port. In a lot of ways, Switch players are lucky, as Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition, which includes the Phantom Liberty DLC, marked the end of a long road that was taken to fix the game, which took developer CD Projekt Red 3 years to get to a point audiences cheer rather than trash the experience. In that way, the release of the title on the Nintendo Switch 2 gives Switch owners a dated game, but one that comes with almost every fix the game has picked up along the way.
At its core, the experience remains unchanged in Cyberpunk 2077, and the Nintendo Switch 2 manages to run it pretty well. You take the role of V, who is about to become the biggest name in Night City after a job goes wrong and death becomes more of a when, not an if. To do this, the player gets a huge selection of guns and bio chips to fight their way to the top, along with Keanu Reeves in their head throughout every second of the experience. There is also a fantastic soundtrack of punk rock to sync that you get to enjoy as you drive in a car or on foot. The Nintendo Switch 2 actually has a solid portable speaker built into the system itself, which Cyberpunk 2077‘s music and voice acting serve as a great showcase of, though not the only one available at launch.
As a massive RPG (For those who have never played the game), you begin by creating your character and getting to pick a life path, which serves more of an origin narrative. This choice of path, past the first two hours, plays out more in the form of dialog choices you get rather than major events later on. Players also have access to a few leveling trees, an actual level that gives access to improvements to base skills, and a massive skill tree housed within. You can’t hope to fill it all out, but thankfully, since this is the improved level tree added in 2.0, respeccing your stats is easy if you made a mistake.
Gameplay runs for the most part smoothly, but I have found that the new Switch Joy-Cons are a little more sensitive than I was expecting them to be, making some things like car handling a little floaty compared to normal. The game started with gyroscopic controls enabled, so that might have contributed to it initially, but after disabling it, there was still something I saw. Gunplay, for its part, felt a lot tighter, and even in the major events where a huge group of enemies charged me, and I engaged them all, the game ran smoothly throughout, with the ability to use all of my abilities without the game being overloaded on all these processes to begin bottlenecking itself. I would point to Yakuza Kiwami on the Nintendo Switch, which saw huge dips in framerate and performance the second more than 8 people were in a fight.
The most noticeable thing upon starting the game is the graphics, which appear to have been downgraded. There are also a lot of pop-ins of textures, and distance issues, with closer textures being noticeably pixelated and blurred while further ones not loading in at the degree they do elsewhere. This will become noticeable as soon as the game starts and V is seen checking themselves in a mirror, which happens in all three life paths. This being said, I haven’t played the PlayStation 4 version of the game in years, having spent time recently with the version on PlayStation 5, as well as PC, prior. In both cases, you can expect a more powerful version of the game than what you get here. The graphical downgrade, however, quickly justifies itself when you can pull the console of the base and take it on the go with you.
The biggest issues that were encountered throughout my playthrough were an unstable framerate at times, both on its base and as a portable game. First off, in combat, driving the city, taking on gigs, you can expect to run the game pretty stably, far more stably than one could have expected the Nintendo Switch to run a game like this, Hogwarts Legacy being a prime example of just how much you needed to port down to get your game to run in general. Here we can see that the Nintendo Switch 2 has seen a marked improvement in power. These dips occur during major scenes, when passing load points in the open world, something that crashed the game when it released in 2021, so I can live with that. You will get them outside of these points as well, it’s not like when moments pick up, these can’t happen there as well. What was weird was that even on TV, I would get these dips at the same parts I expected to get them, which, given Nintendo’s numbers for both play options being different, this kinda felt less change in the way of play.
Another thing is that Cyberpunk 2077 is extremely taxing on the battery of the Nintendo Switch 2. In a session I had starting at a full battery while I was by the pool, away from places to charge my system, I think I had an experience that lasted around 2 hours before the system started to flash that it was losing charge. For a system that banks heavily on its hand-held functionality, this could arguably be the bigger turn-off, even than crashing.
Once I had passed the first act, or at least what I would consider the end of the first act, there was a marked increase in the game crashing. This happened, maybe within 2 or 3 hours of each session, and in total, maybe four crashes. It is hard to say if this issue is on the Switch 2 hardware or on the part of CD Projekt Red, but I haven’t really seen this issue since I was playing it on the PlayStation 4. On the one hand, it happened a lot more then than it does now, on the other, the fact that it happens at all puts the Switch version at a disadvantage to all modern versions of the game.
Verdict
Cyberpunk 2077 on the Nintendo Switch 2 is, for lack of a better way of putting it, not the strongest place to play the game. This version of the game is really for people like me, who buy it everywhere because we have no self-control, or most likely, Nintendo fans that have long since had the Nintendo Switch as their primary console. This port is of a much higher quality than you could have expected a game of the same size and scope to be on the Nintendo Switch. The framerate, while there are dips, runs mostly stable. The game is also running as intended, not needing to make concessions on its open-world or narrative to achieve and experience that is, for the most part, the same as it is on other platforms.
There are noticeable downgrades made to allow the game to run here, which does speak to the lack of power that the Nintendo Switch 2 has compared to its contemporaries. The graphics, pop-in, pixelation, and draw distance all feel less than that of the best next generation of PlayStation and Xbox, and this is a launch title. The crashing issue was not the most noticeable until you sink way too many hours into the game to feel you can turn back, but it was weird given that Cyberpunk 2077 hasn’t had that issue in years, which might speak more to the hardware similarities between the previous generation and this new one for Nintendo.
All of this being said, I actually enjoyed being able to lie on the couch and help Judy Alvarez free clouds from Tiger Claw control, or Panaam Palmer go on what the film industry would call a roaring rampage of revenge. All the fun is there and waiting to be had. This is as close a port of a AAA title as we have seen on the Nintendo Switch 2, which is saying something. It is still hard to recommend the game beyond players who have never had access to it before now, this is not the peak version if you have options.
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Reviewed For Nintendo Switch 2
Developer: CD Projekt Red
Publisher: CD Projekt Red
Release Date: June 5th, 2025
PROS:
+ Same Great Experience
+Runs Good Overall
+World and Scope Maintained
+Versatile ways to play
CONS:
-FrameRate Dips
-Crashes later in game
-Downgraded Graphics
-Battery Life
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Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition
