1-2-Switch (Switch)

There will forever be one great question floating around the history of 1-2-Switch: why didn’t Nintendo make it a pack-in title for the Switch? Released in tandem with the system and bearing its name even, 1-2-Switch seemed almost constructed to be paired with the console, it being a collection of casual-friendly party games that helped show off the new technologies present in the system. However, 1-2-Switch was instead released separately, and even then, a new question arises of why it was 50 dollars for a rather lean causal game. Perhaps Nintendo knew it could get away with the price since it sold over 3 million copies anyway. However, when it comes to the quality of a game, the price tag and release methods are irrelevant, but after playing through the 28 minigames on offer, the odd situation around 1-2-Switch’s release may only seem stranger.

 

1-2-Switch is almost entirely focused around building new and strange uses for precise motion controls, the Switch’s joy-con controllers able to work even when pointed away from the system and packing many little features that can add new layers to minigames such as its HD Rumble. Almost all of them are designed around two players competing in quick minigames that are explained by little videos featuring real people, and these videos can offer a bit of comedy as the actors lean hard into overacting and getting overly enthusiastic about the games they’re playing. The videos definitely remain practical, but for some of the stranger games like the one about milking a cow and the eating contest game where you pretend to eat your controller, the human player expressions are appropriately ridiculous. At times the game could definitely be better off explaining the game in clear terms or just featuring text instructions, especially since certain mechanics important to victory might end up explained only in the between round loading screens. These loading screens can contribute more than just play tips though, adding extra doses of silliness or even suggesting new ways to remix the games.

The quality and longevity of 1-2-Switch’s motion control minigames varies wildly though. For every solid idea there seems to be one half baked, for every mediocre one there is one that just doesn’t work well. Certain games are no doubt going to draw out a competitive edge from players where they’ll want to retry again and again, the potential for swings in either player’s favor always present but a level of skill still required. On the other hand, some are so bland in how they’re executed or controlled you’ll likely want to never play them again after the first visit. 1-2-Switch actually tries to put a few of its best front and center though when you’re starting out, offering only 7 games until you’ve tried out a few, and these are appropriately enough some of the game’s strongest.

 

Quick Draw and Samurai Training are among your starter pack, and they’re some of the best in the package both for their relative simplicity and their potential for replay. Quick Draw takes place just like an old fashioned Wild West duel, players needing to pull out their controller like a revolver and press a button after hearing the word Fire. The speed of the game, the tension of waiting for the cue, and the potential for the result to change each round keep Quick Draw a quick and easy game to go back to, and even if it starts to lose its luster, you later unlock Fake Draw where the game will call out words similar to Fire to try and trick anyone too jumpy. Samurai Training puts the time and tension into the hands of the players, one swinging down their controller like a sword and the other needing to raise theirs to catch it before it hits. The timing gets tighter on repeat swings, so a game can have a few rounds while still reaching a natural conclusion where the faster reflexes win. However, putting the instigation of the exchange on the players adds the potential for fakeouts and other fun social plays outside the context of the game screen prompting you to act. Sneaky Dice takes this even farther, a game where you roll some dice and your controllers rumble to tell you what the other player rolled, the goal being to psyche out the other player into rerolling to win a mysterious duel of hidden number rolls. With no social angle it would be incredibly dull, but Sneaky Dice asks you to be deceptive with your interaction, 1-2-Switch seeming to understand on some level that a lot of fun can come from multiplayer games outside of what the game itself provides.

 

Weirdly enough though, there are single-player games in this package, and neither of them are very good. Baby asks you to rock the Switch like a crying child but it adds no game element to it that swinging a real baby back and forth wouldn’t provide save a high score for the time it took to put the kid to sleep. Eating Contest had more potential since it wasn’t as straight forward and dull, the push to eat the fake food fast by chomping your mouth near the joy-con’s IR sensor lending itself to quicker, more repeatable high score challenges. However, it seems to struggle to read mouth movements, and I ended up getting it to register bites more by pursing my lips and wiggling them than doing the chomping motions it wasn’t reading right. It’s not the only game with issues like that, as the shaving game where you are meant to shave an invisible beard around your face based on rumble feedback is incredibly prone to instead have you waving your arm off into the air and somehow clipping your whiskers that way instead, undermining the framework entirely. Sports games in 1-2-Switch are similarly so poorly built that they can’t be enjoyed well, mainly because you’re usually left playing them with only audio clues. Playing ping pong on an invisible table with an invisible ball and with only audio clues to go by for when to swing your paddle makes misses feel undeserved and the ability to lob or drop your shot only adds a complication to timing your swing right, especially since the ball moves so quickly that you can’t really stop to consider if the ball is being hit differently or not. Baseball has the same issue, one player as the pitcher able to mix up between slow and fast invisible pitches that the batter can’t really be too cautious of or else they might miss the cue for the faster one waiting to see if it was the slower one. Baseball even has a single inning framework to it with no fielding element, but rather than giving points for a hit, you might get your swing caught by a nonexistent fielder or it might be a home run with only the timing really determining that small margin between drastically different outcomes.

Moving back to some better conceived games, Telephone is a simple game where players put the controller on the ground and pick it up when they hear the appropriate ringtone, various false ones also playing to trick players into picking up early. This game is perhaps the best enhanced by the loading screen tips, that being to place the controller at different distances or configurations to make answering it more than just doing it the second you hear the right ring. Fast, easily replayed, and easy to swing in either player’s favor, it again hits the same notes as the other decent games, but there are some good ones that stray from this idea. Signal Flags works like Simon Says where you position your controller up, down, or to the sides based on an female instructor’s call… or do the opposite if the male instructor calls it out instead. Copy Dance has players set joy-con moves and positions to the beat and the other needs to mirror them, while the bit more finicky Dance Off encourages crazy dancing with your controllers simultaneously. Zen involves players striking yoga poses and trying to be as still as possible while doing them, the game again suggesting you might want to try and throw your opponent off balance for extra fun. These all have more physical elements to them and also play into the more visual side of the game, where you are meant to sort of make a fool of yourself while playing so things are fun for a watching audience, but these mix in that need to move quick or move right with clear goals and a need to engage with the concept properly. A few other games try to do this and end up falling flat.

 

Runway wants you to strut your stuff like a runway model, but it’s easier to earn points by just shaking your controller in the way it expects. A few games just involve shaking the controller wildly too, such as a beach running game with nothing more to it than a shaking contest and the Soda Shake game where you shake it and pass the controller around until it pops open, there being little feedback to really make the game as tense as it could be as the pressure builds. Milk, one of the goofier games on offer, involves trying to get the timing down for pulling on invisible cow teats but can be quickly solved once you understand the game, just like air guitar where you are meant to strum to a song’s rhythm that never changes between rounds. We find a few games that also ask for a bit from players like the sword fight game where you are meant to swing to strike and deflect with how you position the controller, but these are hard to do well with small devices rather than the large weapons they represent. Wizard duel does this better with a more abstract fight taking place where you use you controllers like wands for a beam battle where its more about anticipating a push and countering it than trying to read how a foe swipes their hand around. Boxing Gym ends up instead a matter of throwing the right punch once they’re called out, hitting similar marks to the flag game but also being about moving first so you land the blow in-game instead of your opponent, so the duel-structured games often come out better when they’re not leaning less on direct countering and more on prediction or reflexes.

 

To show off the HD Rumble, 1-2 Switch also has a few games that rely solely on it, but it also shows some of the laziness in structuring these games. Baby may have been weak in play and boring in concept, but Joy-Con Rotation is such an uninspired title that it’s no surprise you’re doing a very dry game of spinning your joy-con and placing it on the ground while trying not to tilt it or shake it by accident. Ball Count is a nifty showcase of how it can feel like there are actual balls rolling around in the controller, but the guessing game tied to how many there supposedly are isn’t too interesting since that’s all there is too it. Safe Cracker though swings things back a little, where the rumble now tells you if you have the combination right while unlocking a safe, but like many of the better games its a bit small and quick, meaning it needed some meatier companionship to support the game as a whole. With games like Gorilla though where it has trouble reading how you rhythmically beat your chest being more common than games like Treasure Chest where you race to rotate a chest around to unravel the chain around it in a quick, tense showdown, you’ll find most of the experience skews towards the weaker or downright awful games, the decent or good ones overwhelmed by the more annoying or braindead ones. This can be an actual issue if you choose to do the board game like mode where players on teams spin to see which game is played next. With the majority flawed, annoying, or dull, you might end up hoping for a middle of the road game like Plate Spin where you just rotate the joy-con upward to keep a virtual plate going since it at least means you skipped the awful audio sports or the dull shaking games. The spinner does seem to try and tilt you towards playing most games on the board though, so playing only the minigames you like one at a time is definitely the better option for a party.

THE VERDICT: With over half of its games being either too dull to want to play again, easily solvable so they stop being fun challenges, prone to control issues, or flawed as a concept, 1-2-Switch ends up with few minigames to really redeem it, and even some of those are just passable. The tense duels of Quick Draw, the reaction challenges of Telephone and Signal Flags, the social interaction of Sneaky Dice… these can’t hold up an experience where poor audio-only adaptations of sports, shallow shaking games, and minigames with zero longevity crowd them out. There is room to enjoy just the better games for some quick casual fun at a party, but they’ve been packaged with just a few too many undercooked ideas, making the game as a whole more prone to groaning than laughter.

 

And so, I give 1-2-Switch for the Switch…

A BAD rating. While individual tastes and the skill levels of the people playing may swing a few minigames one way or another, especially when it comes to the mechanically mediocre ones, most of the 1-2-Switch’s collection finds itself so simple that it can’t excite or requiring a complexity that the controllers and structures don’t fit. The audio sports could be more fun if the windows for success weren’t so rigid, the sword fighting game could be better if you weren’t trying to watch tiny controllers swing. Games like Ball Count could be more interesting with more going on in them besides a simple counting game and games that can be refined into near perfection too easily like Milk and Air Guitar could use some way to shake up their play. On top of adding control refinements to games like Eating Contest and Shave, the bad games could be easily tweaked into more tolerable or even enjoyable versions. Leaning on the player to come up with new ways to play isn’t always as fruitful as it is in Telephone, but there are a few at least that have a foundation strong enough to support repeat plays without things feeling too similar, games like Copy Dance and Sneaky Dice especially prone to a different experience every time just by their nature.

 

However, no matter how good some of the 28 games might be, they’ve kept poor company, and since the ones that stand out as more enjoyable aren’t really exemplary ways of playing with friends and simply fun amusements or serviceable diversions, the duds of this collection make 1-2-Switch more likely to bore or irritate than excite.  If it had been a pack-in title for the Switch’s launch, it would show off the flexibility of the controllers and their new features, but tech demos don’t often have a lot of gameplay substance, 1-2-Switch not spending the time it needed to develop some of its game ideas outside of their basic idea and leaving this mishmash of multiplayer concepts with too few highlights.