Is Minecraft on Nintendo Switch Worth It In 2023?

In 2022 I was playing a lot of Nintendo switch games and at one point I got curious about Minecraft on the switch upon looking for reviews on YouTube I found that many of them were quite negative telling the viewer to steer away from this version as its performance is so horrible because

Apparently the Nintendo switch is so underpowered despite this I got it anyway and ended up playing more than 100 hours and counting I’ve had a lot of fun playing it so far in fact the Nintendo switch group I play with got so into the game that we started our own

Server and all play together in this video I want to dive a bit deeper into what makes this version of Minecraft good and bad so you can decide for yourself whether it’s worth your time and money foreign decade since I last played Minecraft in single player mode but I was having so

Much fun that I spent my first 30 hours all by myself initially the controls felt a bit strange to me but I was able to customize them to my liking which helped some players may be new to playing with the controller and can feel awkward at first personally I found the Nintendo

Switch joycons to be somewhat imprecise when playing a game like Minecraft it’s not a major issue but it didn’t feel very smooth to me I tried the Dual sense controller on the PS4 version of Minecraft and it felt much better since I got the Pro Controller for

Christmas I was curious to try it out and it made a noticeable difference in the smoothness of my aiming so if possible that’s the setup I recommend the most it’s not the secret that the best way to play Minecraft is with a keyboard and mouse as it’s the most precise way to

Look around in the first person game however I’ve grown to enjoy playing the game on the couch with the controller as it’s a very relaxing experience one issue I’ve encountered when using a controller though is that writing can be tedious and it’s frustrating when you accidentally close the message window

After typing something conversations can be difficult to maintain and writing with a controller reminding me a bit of composing SMS messages on an old Nokia phone the touch controls in handheld mode help a lot when trying to chat with others on the server as they make this aspect of

The game much more enjoyable when playing in handheld mode I didn’t experience any issues it’s convenient to be able to play Minecraft anywhere you want the menus are easier to navigate as the controller can feel clunky in that regard particularly in the marketplace window while touch controls are somewhat

Limited they can be helpful when doing inventory related tasks sorting items is much easier with the touchscreen and selecting the right items happens much faster sadly it’s not possible to play the entire game with just a touchscreen which is probably for the best as it would be silly to have

Controllers attached to the screen if you’re not going to use them while playing on my own Minecraft on the Nintendo switch felt just like the Minecraft I’ve known and loved for over a decade everything was where I remembered and nothing seemed out of the ordinary exploring caves was fun and

Hectic especially because the controls added a new challenge foreign building took a bit of time to get used to but eventually I got the hang of it as I barely played the Bedrock version in the past I was surprised to learn that my Nintendo switch friends could

Just join my single play world it’s less of a world now but a server instead of course I can turn it off but by default it was on and it seemed like a very cool unexpected feature many people could join my server and look at my Village obviously a Nintendo switch online

Membership is required but I didn’t know we could all play together without having to pay for a realm server it gets chaotic quickly when more players are online however the performance didn’t seem to get affected for some reason at one point we even joined someone else’s server and played

There for a few days without any major issues although it’s worth noting that the host player needs to be online for the server to be playable Of course you can also play Minecraft in local split screen with up to four players although everyone needs a whole joy-con pair to be able to play so you can’t just hold the separate joy-cons as controllers I haven’t tried this mode extensively but from my first impressions it seems to run better than

Expected while the single player mode was fun I did eventually spend most of my time playing on our realm server here are a few friends from a Nintendo switch group started playing and building houses all across the map I have my own little town with this hotel for travelers the storage center

And two houses for future villagers if you follow this tunnel you will encounter my girlfriend’s Village Something that we found out much later by surprise is that someone built a house on top of the hill separating us further in the direction of the spawn you will find a more densely populated area where people have built their own houses and infrastructure connecting it all

One person even went all out and constructed their dream Villa out on a private island And of course this wouldn’t be a Minecraft server if there weren’t conflicts and drama involved so a tiny part of the group split up and decided to build cool sculptures and pixel art on their own creative mode server Things like these that really make Minecraft feel so special just exploring what other players have built and discovering their Journey inside this game bring it from new people and their humble beginnings all the way to the intricate details of more Advanced Builders most of what you’ve seen so far was made

By players playing on the Nintendo switch however because there’s cross play some people play on the PC and the possibility to play from a Playstation or Xbox console is also available all on the same server additionally there’s also a few featured servers to join which shows the large variety of mini games

Those are all completely different experiences from normal Survival Minecraft They can be quite fun and refreshing when looking for something new then there’s the Minecraft Marketplace in general it seems to get looked down on a lot why pay for additional content if you could just download different maps and mods for free on PC it is valid criticism and there is a ton

Of garbage here for example the amount of Skyblock Maps being pumped out by this one single account is really concerning and to me this shows only the surface of scammy practices on the marketplace however not every piece of content is equal here there are genuinely fun and valuable items that

You can purchase they’re made by an actual professional teams and provide new functionality and the full experience that you would never find with something as unofficial as Minecraft mods personally I’m a huge fan of mashups exclusively on the Nintendo switch version of Minecraft you also get to

Play as Mario characters and explore a Mario theme the world It’s quite cool and it opened up my curiosity to other Maps such as Disney World which I strongly recommend if you’re into this sort of thing my girlfriend and I recently went to Disneyland Paris so seeing Disney World in Orlando was quite fascinating as a lot of attractions appear to be the same

Across continents it’s also surprising how faithful the recreation is And this is just one of many Maps so if you’re careful with what you buy you can actually find cool experiences that are so unique that they feel like their own game oh I didn’t mean to frighten you prematurely if I had to come up with a percentage I

Would say that the game ran smoothly for 95 percent of the time when playing by myself with activities such as building farming exploring caves and fighting causing no issues however the Nintendo switch version has a lower draw distance than other versions meaning that it only loads up to 14 chunks ahead while this

Might seem like a drawback it didn’t cause too many problems for me most of the time I could see everything I wanted to see the biggest issue I encountered was when I was searching for an NPC village using a boat whenever I explored new areas it took an excruciatingly long time for the

Chunks to load making the process of finding the village very frustrating as I spent half of my time waiting as I have the physical copy of the game I was curious to see whether there was even a slight difference compared to my girlfriend’s digital copy saved on her

Micro SD card but the loading times seem persistent either way this is clearly an issue that affects every player as soon as there is fast movement involved it’s a shame because it’s a given that you can just use Minecart systems boats and wings to travel far distances

As it stands now those features are difficult to enjoy like this however playing on the realm server fixes this issue immediately makes sense because they’re hosted on powerful servers that can load chunks very fast but this is not necessarily something people would want to invest in just to

Be able to enjoy basic features I’m not entirely sure why this is a thing Everyone likes to bash the Nintendo switch for being an underpowered console especially in recent times with unfinished games coming out that make the switch look like it’s just an old tablet however the switch also runs games like grid

Autosport Zelda breath of the wild and Mario Kart 8. all great looking and smooth running games so from what I’ve heard in general the Minecraft console versions are not optimized properly and especially the Nintendo switch version suffers from a few additional issues I know it’s fun to blame the hardware but

It’s not just the console’s fault here in general there seems to be a lot of loading issues with the console versions a severe case I found was that when loading a world the player character seems to appear before you yourself can see anything most of the time that’s okay but there

Have been instances where I load in dead because I couldn’t defend myself in time at one point I even couldn’t progress in the game anymore because I kept getting killed while joining the nether going into creative mode temporarily to build a small safety shelter around the portal fixes that issue but how this

Major game breaking problem hasn’t been picked up already is alarming I want to emphasize however that this seems to happen across multiple platforms and not only on the switch something I also saw being criticized a lot specifically on the switch was the startup time for the game

Using the physical copy of Minecraft it took around 15 seconds to be playable and around 1 minute until the Nintendo account and then the Microsoft Account fully loaded the general load time is fine but the account part is rather awkward you can play without waiting the full minute but sometimes your skin

Won’t get loaded properly or other inconveniences occur additionally pressing the home button if you’re on the server will make you lose connection These are all minor issues that barely affected my gameplay but it does make the game feel a bit taped together in some areas and that sort of summarizes My overall experience with Minecraft’s performance on the switch sure it’s not perfect and it sounds worse than it is but most

Issues go unnoticed unless you’re really looking for them initially I was expecting a lot of raindrops and tons of crashes but it’s fine it’s a proper game and it usually works as intended Personally I’ve had a lot of fun with Minecraft on the Nintendo switch by myself with friends on the Realms and also with maps from the marketplace in the end it doesn’t really matter which platform you play Minecraft on Minecraft is still Minecraft even on the Nintendo switch if you have a steam deck

Good for you obviously some versions will run smoother than others bow accounts is having fun with the game and you will definitely encounter that here whether you’re on the couch or on the go if you have a Nintendo switch and wondered whether it’s worth getting Minecraft for it it ultimately comes

Down to your own preferences there are some trade-offs like the controls so maybe hardcore players aren’t the best audience but if you just want to enjoy the game go for it I can only recommend and so do the many other players on this and many other servers

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