Orbitals Switch 2 Reviews Are In Ahead of September 3 Launch

Orbitals Switch 2 reviews have arrived, and critics are largely impressed with Shapefarm’s retro anime-inspired co-op debut. With the review embargo lifted ahead of the game’s September 3, 2026, launch, Orbitals is currently sitting around 81 on Metacritic and in the low-to-mid 80s on OpenCritic, where it holds a “Mighty” rating with roughly 94 to 95 percent of critics recommending it.

Worth clarifying up front: this is Orbitals, the plural-titled Nintendo Switch 2 exclusive from Shapefarm and Kepler Interactive. It’s unrelated to a couple of similarly named indie titles, including a 2D space colony sim called Orbital on Steam and a separate action game of the same singular name, so make sure you’re looking at the right listing if you go searching for it.

Orbitals Switch 2 Reviews – What We Know

Orbitals is a two-player asymmetrical co-op puzzle-adventure played from a third-person perspective, first revealed at The Game Awards in December 2025. Players control Maki and Omura, two inexperienced space explorers trying to save their crumbling home station from a supernatural cosmic storm, piloting ships through asteroid fields and solving environmental puzzles that require constant coordination between both players.

Shapefarm, a Tokyo-based studio making its debut with this release, built the game around swappable roles rather than fixed characters, so players can trade tools and responsibilities between runs instead of being locked into one job the whole way through. Jakob Lundgren, the game’s director, previously worked as a designer at Hazelight Studios on A Way Out, It Takes Two, and Split Fiction, and the influence of those genre-defining co-op titles shows up clearly in how critics have described the experience.

The game’s biggest calling card is its presentation. Shapefarm partnered with Studio Massket for hand-crafted anime-style cutscenes, complete with full Japanese and English voice acting, aiming to recreate the specific feel of late-80s and early-90s anime rather than a generic modern art style. Reviewers have consistently singled this out as the game’s strongest element, alongside its flexible co-op tool-swapping. Orbitals supports local split-screen and online co-op through the Switch 2’s GameShare feature, meaning only one player in a pair needs to actually own the game.

Critical opinion isn’t universally glowing. Several reviews noted the roughly six-to-ten-hour campaign doesn’t quite match the puzzle creativity or narrative depth of the games that inspired it, with a handful pointing to repetitive backtracking and dialogue that occasionally leans too hard into anime-trope one-liners. Eurogamer and a couple of other outlets landed notably below the overall consensus, making them outliers in an otherwise strongly positive spread of scores.

What This Means for Switch 2 Owners

A 95 percent critic recommendation rate for a debut game from a brand-new studio is a genuinely strong showing, and it adds another notable co-op exclusive to the Switch 2’s growing library. For a system that’s leaned heavily on first-party titles so far, a well-reviewed third-party exclusive like this helps diversify what the platform has to offer.

The GameShare-friendly setup is also worth highlighting for anyone weighing a purchase, since it lowers the barrier for co-op specifically: one household only needs a single copy to play through the whole campaign together, provided both players have a Switch 2.

What’s Next for Orbitals

Launch is set for September 3, 2026, expected to unlock at local midnight worldwide. No other platforms have been announced, and Kepler Interactive hasn’t indicated whether Switch 2 exclusivity is timed or permanent. Review scores may continue shifting slightly over the next few days as more outlets publish their verdicts.

Orbitals FAQ