Drag x Drive Review

If you’re one of the Nintendo fans who worried the company lost its creative spark after playing it fairly safe with the Switch 2, let me introduce you to Drag x Drive: a wheelchair basketball-inspired sports game that’s controlled almost entirely with the Joy-Con 2’s mouse mode. True, it’s surprisingly drab in personality considering it comes from the company that’s brought us some of the most iconic characters and worlds in gaming, but even after 20 years of playing every bizarre motion-controlled game from the Wii on down, I can safely say this is something I’ve never seen before. Perhaps more surprising to hear, I actually really like how Drag x Drive plays. I respect the ambition to try something entirely new, even though I recognize the result is definitely not going to be for everyone. But despite its surprisingly good gameplay, Drag x Drive is pretty disappointing in terms of the content outside of its three-on-three online matches, with a lack of variety and enticing unlockables you’d expect from a game like this.

From the look of it, the main reason this game exists is to showcase the Joy-Con 2’s combination of built-in mouse and motion controls. The separated left and right controllers direct your baller’s left and right arm, respectively; you can slide the controller on a flat surface to have your arm push your wheels forward and backward, lift and flick your wrist after you line yourself up with the hoop to shoot the ball, and wave to a teammate to signal that you’re open for a pass. Drag x Drive plays like a more hardcore version of a game in the Wii Sports series: it’s less pick-up-and-play, with more advanced techniques to master and the added demand of constantly sliding your controllers around. If you hate Wii-era motion controls or any game that leaves your arms and wrists a little bit tired after extended play sessions, you should probably stay far away from this one.

For the first hour or so, it didn’t feel natural. It demands a lot of actions a game has never asked of me before: usually games like Wii Sports rely on simple controls paired with automatic movement, but Drag x Drive puts you in complete control of your character, and I just wasn’t used to it. And when things weren’t going well, like when my opponent kept scoring and I hadn’t yet learned how to stop it, the physicality of it all made for a steeper, more frustrating learning curve than just remembering which buttons to press on a traditional controller (an option that is entirely absent here).

But as I practiced further, I started to really enjoy the way Drag x Drive plays. Once I absorbed the idea, I started comfortably gliding around the lone arena that combines a traditional basketball court with skate park elements, stealing the ball from opponents and then dunking it after doing a flip off a halfpipe. Drag x Drive’s skill ceiling feels surprisingly high, and I can see a hardcore group really latching onto its systems. The mid-match action is very polished as well, with rock-solid performance and cool haptic feedback where you can feel the click of your wheels in the controllers.

It’s generally very responsive, too, if you have a proper surface to play on. That’s a big “if” – never before have I had to undergo so many wardrobe changes to figure out which pants were ideal to wear when playing a video game. Nintendo says you can use your legs for the mouse controls, but the results really varied depending on if I was wearing jeans, pajama bottoms, cotton sweatpants, or athletic shorts, which ended up working the best. Any texture, wrinkles, or folds impacted motion accuracy, and if I wasn’t sitting with my legs perfectly flat like a tabletop, it sometimes wouldn’t register that I was trying to move at all. It takes some work to achieve the best position to play, but once I found it, the controls did work significantly better than I expected.

If you have the option, though, don’t use your lap. Drag x Drive easily worked the best when playing in my office on my desktop PC monitor, which is where I settled after finding that leaning over a living room coffee table wasn’t comfortable enough either. I simply moved my keyboard aside and had the entire flat surface of my desk to slam the Joy-Con 2 on over and over (I will say, the idea of being this rough with controllers that keep going up in price made me feel a little uneasy).

If you manage to get past those initial road blocks, you can start learning some neat tricks to score bonus points. You can pull off a bunny hop as you shoot the ball to score an extra tenth of a point – which is a leap you perform by grabbing your wheels and lifting both controllers up in quick succession. A flashy 540-degree turn that leads into a two-handed slam dunk is worth .4 extra points, and it’s really satisfying trying to get an opening to pull off these risky, advanced techniques – and I had multiple games come down to a fraction of a point difference.

Defense is pretty fun, too: you need to slam into a ball-handling opponent head-on to knock it loose, literally put your hands in the air to try and block a shot, or quickly snag a rebound to regain possession. I learned how important it is to hit the brakes to stop directly in front of an opponent and get up in their face. It accurately replicates the intensity and excitement of a close pickup game, with great moments like grabbing a rebound and driving all the way down the court for an open three, or throwing up a last-second buzzer beater, complete with a dramatic slow motion effect.

You can play offline with bots that are decently smart and always pass you the ball if you signal that you’re open, but the action excels when you take it online with five friends or strangers. It’s fun to coordinate with teammates over GameChat to set them up for an open shot or decide who to guard on defense – and like most competitive multiplayer games of this nature, there’s really no reason to play offline.

Sadly, outside of the arena, Drag x Drive doesn’t have much going on. The whole affair takes place in what’s called the Park, which has about as much personality as its one-word name implies. It has the same color palette and atmosphere you’d expect from a mall parking lot, with gray concrete everywhere, faint, forgettable music off in the distance, and nobody around (unless you’re playing online, where up to 12 people can join a Park together). Scattered around are a small handful of fun time-based challenges, like racing through obstacle courses, jumping rope 100 times in a row, or scoring as many points as possible, but after reaching the target time for most of them in just a couple of hours, I was left wishing there were more challenges to complete.

One neat idea is that if you’re playing in an online lobby and roaming around the Park trying out challenges at your own pace, a giant video board displays live updates of who has the highest scores in each one. Some challenges award gold rings to the record-holder so everyone wheeling around the park can see who’s the champ. Both features encourage friendly competition if you all buy into it, and I can see this being a decently fun place to hang out with a group of friends as everyone tries to set new high scores in between matches. There are also group minigames to break things up, though those amount to a 30-second race or a sprint to see who can grab the ball first. They’re both pretty skippable, and fortunately, you can easily opt out of participating and just wait for the real game to begin.

The big issue holding Drag x Drive back is that there’s just not that much reason to do anything. Earning trophies by winning games and completing challenges unlocks new helmet designs for your character, but that’s pretty much the only unlockable, and the customization options honestly aren’t that exciting when it’s all just helmets with one or two minor differences, like bunny ears or a spiky hairdo. There’s no leveling up, no meaningful achievements, and nothing to work toward that makes me want to boot up Drag x Drive when I could be playing Mario Kart, Splatoon, or another competitive multiplayer game. I don’t necessarily think a game needs this stuff to be fun, but after 10 hours, I’m skeptical I’ll have much reason to come back outside of friend hangouts. And that’s only if my friends put in the time to click with the gameplay like I have.

Even things like a varied soundtrack, multiple court designs, or original characters with personalities (like in Arms and Splatoon) would go a long way here, but instead it all just feels like the bare minimum. It’s incredibly generic, and it’s a shame that gameplay I genuinely like is wrapped in such a boring, one-note package. That’s not usually Nintendo’s style.

It also has to be said that it’s ironic how, in a game that’s clearly based on wheelchair basketball, there’s no option to play with anything but these physically demanding motion controls, and the settings to adjust how they work are extremely limited. It’s not exactly a poster child for accessibility in video games.