Nintendo’s new Joy-Con party game is better with a smartphone

Everybody 1-2-Switch is easily Nintendo’s weirdest game of the year.

Unceremoniously announced via a Tweet earlier this month, the sequel to the 2017 launch title sees up to 100 players (!) participating in a series of party games, hosted by a man wearing a horse head.

We recently had the chance to try out the game at a Nintendo event in London. You can listen to our full impressions via the video above, but the gist is that it was surprisingly good fun – when it wasn’t trying to be a motion control game like the original.

Everybody 1-2-Switch adds support for up to 100 players with smart devices, or up to eight players with Joy-Con controllers.

We played the game with a group of journalists in Team Contest mode, which splits the group into two teams to compete in a random selection of games across either 20-minute, 40-minute, or 60-minute sessions.

The most enjoyable games in our session were undoubtedly those that utilised smartphones. Setup was easy; players need to scan a QR code displayed on the television in order to connect and setup their user profile.

From this point, your device acts as a second screen – at points, reminiscent of a Wii U game. A Quiz game displayed ‘A’ and ‘B’ buttons on your device, with players having to quickfire answer questions displayed on the television. In the Ninja mini-game, some players are tasked with throwing ninja stars from their device by flicking them using the touch screen.

Aside from the quiz, the highlight of our session was a Colour Search game, which names a specific colour on the television (such as royal blue), and then players have a short time limit to use their phone cameras to take a picture of this colour, sending them scouring the room for matching items.

Games which relied more on motion, such as the Ninja title in which one player has to ‘swipe a sword’ to deflect other players’ ninja stars, felt far less compelling. The sword player is supposed to listen out for the sound of star players’ attacks and respond with a ‘swipe’ of their phone, but our session descended into random flailing in the air until somebody won.

So from our brief play session, Everybody 1-2-Switch does appear like it will have more appeal for large family gatherings, compared to just a small group of friends.

Of course, all of this should come with the caveat that co-operative titles are always more enjoyable in controlled environments such as press events or trade shows. There’s a reason Evolve won game of the show at E3 2014, before its disappointing launch reception: because the co-op partners you get online are far less agreeable than those in person.

Everybody 1-2-Switch will release on June 30 priced at $29.99 / £24.99.