Nintendo Switch - Game Previews (1 of 5)

Thanks to the fine folks at Nyteworks (www.nyteworks.net), I got advanced hands-on experience with the upcoming Nintendo Switch and many of its games. I’ll be covering my game experiences this week, ordered alphabetically for the sake of simplicity, and will be covering my hardware experiences on Episode 36 of the BumbleKast (scheduled Monday, Feb. 6th).

1-2-Switch

Release Date: March 3rd , 2017

1-2-Switch is a collection of party games meant to showcase the unique features of the Switch hardware. It is, in essence, this generation of hardware’s Wii Sports. Wii Sports worked well because its games, while simple, were solid and intuitive. You played as your Mii, bringing the novelty of personalization.

1-2-Switch feels like it’s trying to capture the same kind of pick-up-and-play, open-to-everyone mentality of Wii Sports but coming up short. It has some of the quirkiness of the Warioware series, but none of the personality. Its instructional demos and advertisements seem to try to win you over with ironically “normal” people, but they’re doing these weird games – isn’t that wacky?! 

The games themselves feel more like tech demos for the hardware and less like games. And unlike Wii Sport’s satisfying swing of the “bat” or rolling of the “bowling ball,” 1-2-Switch has you using the Joy-Cons in all manner of ways that, while reasonable, aren’t really fun or immersive. 

In short: It’d be fine if it was packaged with the Switch, but it has no business being a full retail game.

Arms

Release Date: Q2 2017

When Arms was announced during the Switch reveal event, I was less than enthused. It looked like a shallow launch title to promote the Switch’s gimmicks. However, having gotten my hands on it, I feel like I owe its development team an apology.

The five characters available in the demo each had distinct play styles and had a charm to their designs that felt distinctly Nintendo, almost reminiscent of Wonderful 101. At the beginning of each round, you can pick which fists you want to equip out of three sets, mixing and matching fist types. These change your punching style, its spread, and the effects of your charged-up specials.

Everything is controlled via the two Joy-Cons. You strafe, advance and retreat by tilting them, dash with LB and jump with RB. Punching comes from physically punching, and it feels far more responsive than Wii Sport’s “flail and prevail” system. When I played, it felt like a frantic but coordinated effort. Spamming punches won’t work – actually gauging your opponent and playing to the strengths of your character and their load-outs make a huge difference.

The potential pitfall I see is fighting the computer opponents. As robust as the controls are, I still felt like movement was a bit cumbersome. The precision of a computer controlled opponent is going to be impossible to match by a human. Hopefully they’ll account for that when programming the A.I.

In short: Potentially the next Splatoon. It’s fun to play, more robust than it lets on, but will live or die on its hardware gimmick.