Ring Fit Adventure

Genre: Sports (Exercise) / Action-RPG

Players: 1, Online Leaderboards

.

Review:

Ring Fit Adventure is a Exercise game with some light Action-RPG elements that has been, since it was released, in very high demand and extremely low supply. And now that I’ve finally gotten ahold of one for myself, I’ve decided not to hold off on publishing the review until a special occasion as I sometimes do with the big first-party titles, because as they filter into stores, many will undoubtedly be wondering if it’s worth all the trouble.

Graphically, Ring Fit Adventure looks very good – far better than it has to, given what it is. This is, after all, a fitness game, and those aren’t generally trying to impress with graphics. However, Ring Fit Adventure has some large, colorful and imaginative environments with good framerates and resolution, and while there’s nothing in the character models or the environmental detail that looks impressive on any technical level, it’s still a nice game to look at.

The music here is very good too (the standard battle music in particular is very catchy), but the sound… well, throughout the game, you’ll be listening to an instructor giving directions, which is fine, but mostly you’ll be listening to one of the game’s central characters, Ring (inventive, I know), and at the outset of the game you’ll get to assign Ring a male or female voice… and both of them are annoying. It’s fine, you can just ignore it, but it’s still worth a mention.

When it comes to the gameplay, Ring Fit Adventure actually addresses many of the issues I had with Nintendo’s other fitness game on the Nintendo Switch, Fitness Boxing. In my review of Fitness Boxing, I complained about that game’s poor motion-sensing, and the disappointing lack of actual videogame elements that made it feel like more of a workout aide than a game. Neither of these are an issue in Ring Fit Adventure.

The game comes with two accessories – the Ring-Con yoga ring, and a leg-strap, each one designed to fit a single Joy-Con, and both do what they need to do rather well… and then some, actually. The Ring-con accurately detects not only when you squeeze and stretch it, but also when you rotate it, when you turn it to the side, or face it up and down. Meanwhile, the leg strap not only detects when you’re walking or running in place, but also when you’re squatting, high-stepping, or even laying down doing crunches. What’s more, the game even makes use of a few features most didn’t even realize the Joy-Con could do – its infrared sensor is occasionally used to measure the player’s heartbeat, and it can even be used to store reps of an exercise while the Nintendo Switch is off and you’re doing some other activity like watching TV, with this activity to be used to boost your stats in the game later.

While a few of these things weren’t perfectly accurate, and I definitely saw ways that the Joy-cons could be tricked if the player felt so inclined (and wanted to rob themselves of a workout), for the most part this worked surprisingly well given the limited motion-sensing capabilities of the Joy-Cons.

The game elements work really well too. Players jog in place to run through levels, aiming the Ring-Con down and squeezing it to do a jump and hover, pressing it in while aiming to blow gusts at the environment, and tugging on it to do a vacuum move. All of this feels really clever and makes sense for the movements. One of the best parts of these games is running through these environments, and I wish that there were some way to do this in an endless loop, because it’s both fun and a damn good workout. Sadly, while you can always go back and re-play levels or chain them together like a playlist, you can’t just run in one endlessly, nor can you explore them, something that their large size really makes you want to be able to do.

These runs through the levels are occasionally interrupted by battles with enemies. During these RPG-esque battles, players alternate between doing one of a selection of workout moves to attack, and then doing a different sort of move to defend, with the game later on making different enemies more susceptible to different types of exercises. This is nice, but I really wish that the game went farther into the RPG elements to really add strategy to it. As it is, it is these battles that much of the artifice strips away and the game feels the most like a workout. Don’t get me wrong, I still very much appreciate what the adventure mode in this game does to gamify exercise, but I felt like it could have gone so much farther.

Having said that, I was delightfully surprised at the healthy variety of other activities the game offers. In addition to the Adventure mode and just plain choosing one of various exercise routines, players can also partake in one of a dozen minigames, and these are all wildly inventive and make excellent use of the motion control using the Ring-Con, such as one that has you hold the Ring-con over your head and aim it while squeezing to deploy a parachute, and another that has one of the most inventive takes on Whack-A-Mole I’ve ever seen in a game. And with each of these games letting you compare scores to others on your friends list, I can definitely see this being a fun source of competition, despite the game only supporting one player. The game also has a music-rhythm minigame that has you manipulating the Ring-Con in different ways to the timing of various songs, though I didn’t find this quite as compelling as the other minigames.

Oh, and yes, if you’re looking for a workout, this game will definitely give you one. And there’s quite a variety too – arms, back, chest, core, legs, thighs, cardio. I don’t claim to be a fitness professional, but this definitely seems like it’d be a great motivator for a regular workout.

Ring Fit Adventure is not perfect – I see plenty of room for improvement working more videogame elements into the main Adventure mode, and giving players more options to explore the environments. But it succeeds at making exercise fun in a way that videogames very rarely accomplish. If you’ve been waiting for this game to become available so you can have something fun to push you to work out during the quarantine, or want to inject your regular workout with something fresh and exciting, Ring Fit Adventure is absolutely worth the wait.

tl;dr – Ring Fit Adventure is an Exercise game with light Action-RPG elements that has you plugging a pair of Joy-Cons into the included Ring-Con and leg strap accessories to use the motion-sensing abilities of the controllers to workout in various ways to assist on your adventure. The motion control here works surprisingly well, and the presentation is very good (annoying character voices aside), plus there’s a good selection of minigames here that are extremely creative and fun. I feel the game’s designers could have gone even farther to add game elements into the exercise bits, but overall this is a one of the best exercise games ever made, and well worth getting if you can find it at a reasonable price.

Grade: A-

^{You can support eShopperReviews on Patreon! Please click HERE to become a Sponsor!}