Review: Badminton Time (Nintendo Switch)

Badminton Time is a multiplayer party game developed and published by DECATHLON. I enjoy playing badminton in real life, and I also love a good motion controls game. I was eager to give this title a try, but was ultimately met with disappointment.

Badminton Time offers a decent amount of content, but there are only so many ways you can play badminton. Its multiple modes should keep you busy for hours, but the gameplay was bland at best. Once you play through all the modes for about five to ten minutes, you’ll see the entire game and most likely won’t play more.

I started with Training, which is the tutorial mode, and that was lackluster. It barely explained anything to you other than the bare minimum. There are five tutorials, each one teaching you one control at a time. The baseline taught the long shot, and while it told me to hold ZR while swinging, it never explained my goal. I was supposed to aim the birdie to a specific spot on the other side of the net to earn points. I didn’t figure it out until I accidentally landed the shot and the spot glowed positively.

Sadly, no amount of training could prepare you for the controls. Badminton Time’s controls are its biggest flaw. The motion controls are good in theory, but you have to play with two Joy-Con. I’ll explain this as best I can; you use the left Joy-Con in your left hand to move your avatar on the court with the analog stick. You use the right Joy-Con in your right hand to do the motion controls by swinging your arm. (Or hold them vice versa depending on your dominant hand; the game allows you to customize that.)

If that sounds confusing, that’s because it is. It tripped my brain out. When playing, I’d often move my body while swinging, thus crashing into my poor unsuspecting sister, or I’d move my avatar and forget to swing my arm.

With those controls in mind, let’s go over the other modes available in Badminton Time. Realistic is playing normal badminton with its actual rules. You can play in a tournament to earn a trophy, one-v-one an NPC, or do a match with friends locally or online. Ranked matches are also available against people online to get on their leaderboard, but I didn’t bother trying to do that.

Arcade mode is the same as Realistic except superpowers are in the mix. This did not work well at all. Your birdie can catch fire or you can use a cloud power that changes the wind direction. At least, I think that’s how it worked? It was difficult to tell when I was so focused on following the birdie. Not to mention you had to earn the powers by hitting them with the birdie. It was too much, and using the powers felt like they did nothing. Arcade mode was like Realistic mode but annoying for everyone.

Finally, there are five mini games. Loot chests was about aiming your birdie inside open treasure chests to earn points. Pop the balloons was about aiming your birdie to hit a specifically colored balloon to earn points. There was also a bomb game, a snake game, and coconut shy, which is about hitting cans to earn points. Do you see the pattern? The mini games focused more on aiming and, if you hit anything, you’d earn points. I think this did a better job of teaching me the controls than the training did.

But again, it just wasn’t fun. The mini games in Badminton Time are short-lived. Even though I played with my sister, most of the games defaulted to us playing with two NPCs, and I don’t know why the mini games had to be four-players. We put the computer players in easy mode and still got beat by them.

I owe my sister one for playing this game with me. It’s simply not fun by yourself, but even playing in the same room together with another person, it wasn’t fun. We got bored within the first five minutes of playing, and the controls were too annoying and confusing to keep going.

I will say that the graphics aren’t bad. You can customize your avatar with plenty of outfit choices, which is cool. However, I think the developers spent more time on that than they did the actual game. Badminton Time has potential, for sure, but that’s about it right now.