Badminton Time! Review

Pick up your Joy-cons and get ready to head to the court to play some shuttlecock with your friends in Badminton Time! I am a big fan of other motion sports titles on Nintendo consoles like Wii Sports and more recently Switch Sports, the tennis games are some of my favourite to play. I know that badminton isn’t exactly the same, but it’s similar, and to me, it feels like a slower version of the high-speed tennis matches that you could have.

Jumping into the game, before we check out the different modes available, you will create your character; this person is who you are playing on the court. First, select if you are right or left-handed, your player’s name -called pseudo in the game, and what your player looks like. All the different categories offer male or female features, and you can mix and match them as you wish when you select the head shape, hairstyle, and outfit, including accessories like a bandana or gloves. If you choose to wear a hat, (I picked a cat one) there are a variety, including football helmets if you think this round of badminton is going to be high contact! When my character was wearing a hat, the hair I had selected was gone, and you only see the headwear. I thought that was a little weird because I expected some hair to peek out from underneath, especially if you selected a longer hairstyle. Once your character is made, select the design that appears on your racket, and you are ready to hit the court.

There are a variety of modes that you can select from to play: Realistic, which is like a real round of badminton, Arcade where each player has a superpower, and Mini-game which has a collection of four multiplayer games to play with up to four players. The games include: Loot chests, where you are trying to hit your birdie into the open treasure box; Pop the balloons, where you try to only hit balloons of your selected colour if you hit the ones that aren’t yours, you will lose points; Snake, where you try to hit its body with the shuttlecock to make it disappear; Boom, aim your shot to hit the bombs that are ready to explode to stop them; or Coconut Shy, that has you trying to hit the hanging cans to get the point amount displayed on the can. Why does this last one have coconut in the name? I have no clue, especially since you aren’t hitting coconuts but metal cans…

Badminton Time! has a training mode available to show you how to successfully play badminton with five different exercises. You can try either the Classic or Survival versions with three difficulties: Easy, Medium, and Hard. I remember playing badminton as a kid in gym class, but it has been a long time, so I figured that I should take this as a refresher. In theory, this would have been great, but I found the lessons seriously lacking in direction. All that is displayed on the screen is ZR long shot and X Reset Motion Controls; otherwise, you have to figure out everything just by trial and error. The one mode called Baseline is supposed to show you how to hit towards the far back of the court, but when it only says “hit ZR” that’s not really enough information, so I failed on multiple shots to get them to the lighted square they were supposed to be landing on.

When you are trying to hit one of the shuttlecocks that are coming towards you, you will have to hold down the ZR button and swing your Joy-con at the right time. The spot where you need to aim will move between the left and right sides of the court, so to change the spot I was hitting towards, I found that I needed to turn my whole body and not just try to swing in the required direction. It didn't matter where I stood in the room; it was very hard to change where my shot was going. So I failed all the different training modes multiple times and never figured out what I needed to do differently to successfully complete them.
I decided to jump into some of the mini-games with my son, to see how it played. I figured I wouldn’t have to be as precise with my shots, so it would be easier and more fun to play.

When playing multiplayer, the other people get to select who they are from a handful of premade characters. We decided to challenge the Coconut Shy game and try to hit the hanging cans. This game is played on a split-screen, and there were two computer players along with us, so we each had a quarter of the display. Instead of everyone having their own set of cans to shoot at, we were all shooting at the same hanging cans, so someone could hit a target on their screen, then it suddenly disappeared off of yours. This made it really tricky to figure out which ones you had hit and how to adjust your aim to be more successful. We tried out all the other mini-games too, but had issues with adjusting our shots to hit the required targets in all of them.

Badminton Time! isn’t the most up-to-date-looking game. It actually feels like a VR title because the characters you play as don’t have arms or legs, just floating hands and feet. It actually looks a little like Rayman from the Rabbids games or Rayman Origins. The stages look nice, and there are a variety of different ones that you can visit to play matches on, including the North Pole or a Japanese Garden, which made the rounds a lot more interesting. The music is okay, and it’s not as upbeat or high energy as I would like to get me excited and pumped up; it was more relaxing sounding and can get pretty repetitive.

I think Badminton Time! could be a decent multiplayer sports title if the controls were made more accessible with a training mode that goes into detail about how to set up your shot and how to make changes like how far it goes and how to direct where the birdie will land. Right now, it feels pretty frustrating to play and not as simple as other motion titles like Switch Sports. I don’t think it would be very easy for new gamers to learn how to play; the tight controls just aren’t there. Especially when you swing the racquet in real life and nothing happens on the screen, even when the controllers are totally charged. For now, it feels like a more frustrating experience than it should be.