Fortnite Switch 2 review: The best way to play on the go

Fortnite is a weird one, and reviewing it in 2025 is even weirder. It’s a bit like asking someone to review the concept of free-to-air TV — there’s a lot of stuff there, some good and some bad, and the only thing that really changes is what you view it on. If you’re even remotely familiar with video games in the current year, you probably know just about everything there is to know about Fortnite already, so let’s skip everything else and cut straight to the chase: Fortnite on Switch 2 is pretty good. 

As someone who’s played close to 300 hours of Fortnite on PC and about a dozen hours on the original Switch, the Switch 2 version of the game falls somewhere in the middle of those two experiences. It leans much closer to the PC version of the game, but there’s no escaping that it’s running on a handheld with, at most, a 40W power budget. My PC easily hits 20x that power budget, but that doesn’t mean it looks 20x better than the Switch 2. 

The Switch 2 version of Fortnite looks pretty decent, all things considered. According to Epic, it runs a little bit short of 1440p when docked, and dead on 900p while handheld, and I have no reason to doubt those numbers. It can be a little bit soft-looking at times in both modes, but the tradeoff is that it’s running at a consistent 60fps probably 90% of the time. There are stutters here and there, but there are stutters in every version of Fortnite, and it’s a marked improvement from the Switch version of the game which was sub-30 in almost every scenario. 

That 60fps frame rate comes in handy when using the newly-added mouse mode, too, which lets you use the Joy-Con 2 as a mouse while using the other Joy-Con 2 for movement. It takes a little bit of getting used to, and the default control scheme for mouse mode is a bit janky, but you can change it very easily and after a few tweaks it becomes a very solid option. It’s not the most comfortable configuration, but the level of control – both in terms of movement and for aiming – is incredible, and it’s probably the best possible control option you could get on a console. 

Visually, there’s a lot to like about the game on Switch 2. Granted, it very much falls short of the game on PS5 or a high-end PC, but I don’t think there’s a single handheld device, be it mobile or a handheld PC, that is going to look quite as good as the Switch 2 version of the game. The draw distance is great in both modes, the environmental textures are very serviceable, and enemy characters are made up of more than just a dozen smeary pixels like they were on the original Switch, which makes targeting them actually possible. 

Fortnite is better on Switch 2 than it’s ever been on a handheld device, and a night and day improvement over the original Switch version. It’s more than serviceable in both docked and handheld modes, and it’s almost certainly going to be my main way to play going forward.