SWITCH LITE BREATH OF THE WILD CASE 720P
SWITCH LITE BREATH OF THE WILD CASE PORTABLE

The joysticks and shoulder buttons are near-identical, but the face buttons have sharper edges and depress a little farther in, making them more satisfyingly tactile to use. In the plus column, the buttons built into the Lite are a tangible improvement over regular Joy-Con.

Will the Lite be your first Switch? Here are our favorite games for it: You can certainly buy a third-party USB-C dongle for anywhere from $30 to $50 that lets you pair to any headset (I tried one built for the original Switch and it worked fine here too), but the fact that you’re still forced to seems like a poor choice. That was an odd omission when the Switch came out two years ago, but it’s even more confusing with this mobile-focused iteration.

SWITCH LITE BREATH OF THE WILD CASE PORTABLE

On the topic of headphones, it’s little aggravating that the Lite – a portable device released in 2019 – does not support Bluetooth headphones without an adapter. It’s not a huge issue, and obviously it goes away entirely if you’re using headphones, but it can be genuinely annoying to have my fingertips constantly buzzing while playing a small subset of games. They sound comparable enough to those in the original in quality, but having the volume at higher levels can cause certain music or in-game audio to vibrate the entire device like a ringing phone – which is a little ironic because the Lite doesn’t have built-in controller rumble. However, one drawback of that slim body that I’ve already encountered comes from its speakers. I appreciated that the bezel around the Lite’s screen is slightly slimmer too, thanks in part to the absence of the Joy-Con tracks on each side.

SWITCH LITE BREATH OF THE WILD CASE 720P

From what I can tell, games seem to play pretty much the same here as on the original performance-wise, with the graphics even looking marginally improved at times due to the slightly higher pixel density that comes from having the same 720p resolution crammed into a smaller space.

And even though games that already have a problem with hard-to-read text like Fire Emblem: Three Houses or Dragon Quest Builders 2 certainly still have that issue, the Lite doesn’t make it worse in the way I feared it might. That’s a small distinction, but it means the Lite’s size quickly appears natural, not reduced. I got used to it right away and barely noticed instead when I went back to my regular Switch, its screen suddenly felt noticeably large. While the Lite’s screen is certainly smaller (5.5 inches, down from the original’s 6.2-inch screen), it doesn’t really feel that way while playing.

Switch lite breath of the wild case