1-2-Switch

Genre: Party Game / Minigame Collection

Players: 2-20 Team Competitive

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Review:

1-2-Switch is a Party Game and Minigame Collection that has players using the Joy-Con controllers to participate in various motion-controlled contests with each other. This is one of those games that absolutely requires Joy-Cons, although those with a Switch Lite who have a spare pair of the things will find it works well enough without the bigger screen, as players are actively discouraged from looking at the screen while playing the game.

Given that the game doesn’t want you looking at the screen, I’m not sure how much the graphics even matter here, but for the record, mostly it consists of silly videos of people doing the actions players are expected to imitate, and simplistic depictions of whatever the game is. The acting of the people in these videos is cringe-inducingly cheesy, and the voiced narration that provides instruction is stilted and awkward. So even what little presentation is here is pretty bad.

Players can select from only seven minigames at the start, unlocking the other twenty-one included here after playing through four of the starter set. Here’s a full list of each of them:

Ball Counting

Baseball

Beach Flag

Copy Dance

Eating Contest

Fake Draw

Gorilla

Joy-Con Rotation

Milk

Quick Draw

Runway

Safe Crack

Samurai Training

Shaver

Sneaky Dice

Soda

Sword Fight

Table Tennis

Telephone

Treasure Chest

Wizard

Zen

As for the games themselves… did I say this was a minigame collection? Honestly, it would be more accurate to describe this as a collection of tech demos more than minigames. Some of these games are insultingly simple – Telephone has you setting the Joy-Cons down and seeing who can pick it up first after a telephone ring, while Soda is basically just a game of hot potato where you make a jerking motion with the Joy-Con and pass it on to the next player when you think it has reached its limit before popping the cap.

Some of these games do make clever use of the Joy-con’s features, such as Ball Counting using HD rumble and the gyroscope to simulate a number of ball bearings trapped in the controller players need to guess at. However, other minigames just display the controller’s weaknesses – Shaver is supposed to have you using the Joy-Con to simulate shaving your face, but the poor motion control seems to quickly lose track of where it is relative to the center of your face. And Table Tennis kept insisting that we had hit the ball into an imaginary net without explaining exactly why.

Plus, it bears mention that many of these games could easily be replaced with simple, common objects. Sneaky Dice simulates players rolling hidden sets of dice… when most of us could easily just grab a bunch of real dice. And again, Soda is simply Hot Potato.

If this were a free pack-in game to demonstrate the Joy-Cons, it would be cute, but something you’d play for a bit and then drop, never to touch again. But not only is this game not a free pack-in, not only is this not a budget title, this is a game Nintendo expects players to pay a full $50 for. Even if the 28 minigames included here were fantastic, that would still be highway robbery for only 28 minigames. However, with these games frequently being mind-numbingly simple or just plain bad, this price is highway robbery.

1-2-Switch is a tech demo disguised as a game, and it’s not even a very good tech demo. If this game was $20, I would say it was drastically overpriced. At $50, this is a rip-off, and one that absolutely no one should buy. You may find some mild amusement here, but absolutely nothing worth this ridiculous expense.

tl;dr – 1-2-Switch is a Party Game and Minigame collection that has players not looking at the screen and instead playing almost exclusively with the Joy-Cons themselves. The 28 games included here are more tech demos than minigames, and many of them are horribly simple or just plain bad. This should have been a pack-in freebie game, and even then it would be one you’d play once and never go back to. But at $50, this is a rip-off. Do not buy this game.

Grade: F

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