I love the Nintendo Switch 2, but Online GameShare multiplayer is goddamn awful

We don’t have our Nintendo Switch 2 review live yet, or really any of our reviews for the new console’s launch games either, but I’ve been having a blast with the new handheld. It feels great, looks (mostly) great, and I’ve been revelling in a portable Cyberpunk 2077 experience that runs better than my Steam Deck version.

However, one of the best launch titles for the new handheld is Fast Fusion, an F-Zero-inspired game that’s also a sequel to the OG Switch launch game Fast RMX. While I’ve been adoring the game in single-player, online multiplayer is a bit of a bust. Not because the game is bad in multiplayer, far from it, just that online can only be done via the console’s online GameShare feature, and it’s atrocious.

At the time of writing, local multiplayer via GameShare is not something I’ve tried yet, but it’s a cool concept. Just like the WiiU GamePad, the console will render two views at once, but then stream the second to another Switch. Online, it does the same thing, but also allows games that have multiplayer without online connectivity to become an online multiplayer experience via streaming.

In practice, GameShare is abysmal to look at. Even wired into a 240mbps connection—not the fastest but definitely fast enough—the recipient of the streamed viewpoint is dealt an extraordinarily poor hand. When a game isn’t moving, it can look like a YouTube video from 2005 stretched onto a 4K TV, and it only gets worse when things get moving.

It doesn’t help that Fast Fusion is, by far, the worst case scenario for a feature like Nintendo Switch 2 GameShare. At peak speed, you’re rapidly barrelling through dense forests and complex scenery at hundreds of miles-per-hour with motion blur all around you. It turns into a messy blur where objects you need to avoid only actually pop into view when they’re right in front of you.

When the service is at its worst, it becomes worse than watching a YouTube video from 2005. In fact, it looks more like trying to remember a dream you had an hour ago with the visuals fading, blurring and shifting as you keep pushing forwards.

It seems that Nintendo also knows that GameShare is not a looker. While the host of the GameShare session on Nintendo Switch 2 can take screenshots during the game, anyone who joins cannot. You’re blocked from taking any screenshots of how bad it looks unless you hook up an external capture card which I really didn’t want to do. (My capture card is an old AverMedia LGP device, and it does not play well with Windows 11 at all.)

There is one positive: the latency. As someone who’s played a great deal of cloud gaming services including PlayStation Plus, GeForce Now, Xbox Cloud Gaming, Stadia, Amazon Luna and more, the latency is really damn good. I just wish I could actually see the game while I was playing it. Hopefully, Nintendo can do something to improve the quality of video streaming in a future update, although I don’t really know how they’d do that.

As it stands, Nintendo Switch 2 GameShare is a bit of a bust, although I like that Nintendo attempted to try something new. I’m just hoping the Fast Fusion devs can add in a proper online multiplayer option so I can see where I’m going.