If you’re prepared to make yourself look foolish, there’s limited joy to be found in Nintendo’s latest swing at the party game concept.
You know we’re coming full circle with this incarnation of the Nintendo Switch (I refuse to believe the hybrid style will totally be absent in Nintendo’s next console) when one of its most infamous launch titles gets a sequel. This isn’t just any sequel, however, but a sequel to 1-2 Switch; AKA a game that pretty much everyone agreed – even back then – should have been a pack-in experience similar to how Wii Sports for the Nintendo Wii was handled. And look how successful that turned out!
As a showcase for the Nintendo Joy-Con’s HD rumble capabilities, 1-2 Switch worked perfectly fine and even impressed to some extent. Shaking a Joy-Con to try and size up how many ice cubes were inside, or slowly pulling down to mimic milking a cow felt silly, but was a great statement of intent for how the Nintendo Switch would be fun and family-orientated in a way that PS4 and Xbox One simply weren’t. Yet the novelty quickly wore off. I feel like even Nintendo admits this, given Everybody 1-2 Switch’s de-emphasis on the Joy-Con and HD Rumble in favour of party games playable on a phone.
Let’s call Everybody 1-2 Switch exactly what it is: The Jackbox Party Pack by way of Nintendo. It works for the most part; consisting of a collection of 17 minigames in total, with unique tweaks and variations on each, it’s easy to see how you would fire it up at the next family gathering for some wholesome (or potentially inebriated) chaos. When Nintendo says 'Everybody' it really means it, too, with the game supporting up to 100 players simultaneously. Admittedly, this is obviously more gimmick than feature, seeing as you’re more likely to avoid a blue shell in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe than fit 99 other people in your living room.
A party minigame collection such as this lives or dies on the inventiveness and replayability of the games featured. Could Everybody 1-2 Switch get past the novelty of the original? Yes, surprisingly. It’s at this point in the preview where I’m obliged to tell you that my experience with the game was under extremely controlled conditions, conducted in a room full of other journos in an event hosted Nintendo itself. Not having a choice which minigame to try next or in what mode to experience it in was frustrating, but I’d be lying if I said that my two hours with Everybody 1-2 Switch wasn’t fun. Just as much as any Jackbox Party Pack game, at least.
Horsing around
The first minigame I got to try was Balloon Pump, and it’s exactly as ridiculous as it sounds. Two teams compete to blow up a balloon either side of the screen, doing their best to remember how it looked when inflated, while trying to not blow it up so much that it explodes. The version of Balloon Pump worked out as the best of three, whereby the winning team was the one who hit the highest percentage without having the balloon burst. I can see why Nintendo wanted to show this one off first, because communication was key and more than once me and another journo were at risk of letting the team down by being a bit, shall we say, overzealous with the Joy-Con pumping.
It quickly came to light that, with Everybody 1-2 Switch, you have to be prepared to make a fool of yourself. No minigame evidenced this more than one called Hip Bump (not thrust, crucially) where two people stand back-to-back facing outwards from one another, holding their Joy-Con behind and taking turns to bump one person off the side of the screen. Was this minigame revolutionary or even that inventive? Not by a long shot. But it achieved its goal of getting multiple people involved and stoking competition.
If there’s one major drawback to a lot of the games featured it’s that they rely on the Joy-Con reading your movements correctly – something that six years of Nintendo Switch has taught us isn’t always the case. Just ask the thousands of people who have suffered from Joy-Con drift. Even with the aforementioned Hip Bump there were moments where I swore my back swing wasn’t being picked up. These fears came to light again in Ninjas 2 (I wasn’t afforded the chance to play Ninjas 1) where four players stand around a central player, using their phone screens to swipe ninja stars as the other wields their Joy-Con as a sword to bat them away. It sounds fun, but really just boils down to guessing.
All 17 core minigames can be played using either the Joy-Con, your smartphone or a combination of both, and can be played in increments of 20, 40 or 60 minutes in the main Team Contest mode. We were also shown a mode called Quiz Party, which isn’t minigame related at all and lets players create their own quizzes for up to 100 people to answer. Bingo Party mode works similarly, we were told, though I wasn’t able to see this play out at the Nintendo event.
Is there fun to be had in Everybody 1-2 Switch? Certainly. That said, it’s also easy to see why Nintendo made this preview event incredibly restricted, and its overall trepidation on trying to follow up arguably the Nintendo Switch’s least memorable launch game. As a substitute for the Jackbox Party Pack games it has potential, offering even more value with 17 minigames as opposed to the standard four or five seen in the latter. From a presentation and longevity standpoint, however, I can’t help but remain sceptical.
Everybody 1-2 Switch is fun in the moment but hardly full of the inventiveness we’ve come to expect from a first-party Nintendo game. The original was at least the best display of HD Rumble’s potential, yet this so far seems like a copycat of concepts and ideas already experimented with elsewhere.
