Nintendo Labo is changing the way we look at consoles
At its surface, Nintendo Labo is a fun and innovative blend of building and gaming, but more importantly, it's a concept that's changing the way we think about video game consoles and what exactly defines a video game.
Nintendo's new take on video games, Labo, launches with its first two kits for the Nintendo Switch on Friday, which are kind of like a mix between Lego building, motion-controlled fun, and good old fashioned gaming. Instead of plastic bricks, Labo uses cardboard cutouts that you fold and fit together into predetermined designs, called Toy-Cons, like a fishing pole, a piano, or a visor and backpack with attachments that make you look like a robot.
Each Toy-Con interacts with the Nintendo Switch in one form another, some of them using the Joy-Con controllers to sense different motions and actions which correlate to on-screen actions, others using the Joy-Con's HD rumble feature to vibrate the cardboard Toy-Cons and make them move around, all controlled with the Switch's touch screen.
Instead of instruction booklets, each Toy-Con kit (the Variety Kit and the Robot Kit) comes with a Switch game cartridge that includes video instructions for building the Toy-Cons as well as the games to play them with.
Labo combines the novelty of motion control that the Nintendo Wii made so popular in the mid 2000s with new ways to translate it into gameplay. Like the Wii made us look at new ways to use video game controllers, Labo is making us look at new ways to use consoles.
In the various iterations of Labo, the console and controllers become a fishing pole and porthole into the ocean, a pair of motorcycle handlebars and a console to see where you're going, a remote-controlled car and a touch screen to control it.
The Nintendo Switch console itself is integral to the gameplay, turning what would otherwise be pretty basic games into more immersive experiences.
The robot Toy-Con is the perfect showcase for how the Nintendo Switch works as a whole and exemplifies just how much it can do, especially when combined with Labo. It consists of six major parts: A visor with a Joy-Con in it to track your head movements, two hand grips on strings, two foot straps on strings, and one large backpack where all of the strings lead.
Stuck into the back of the backpack is the right Joy-Con, which as a sensor pointing inside the backpack to read your movement. How does it read your movement? The strings from your limb attachments lead to cardboard bricks with light strips on them, so when you move to take a step or throw a punch, the bricks move up and down, and the Joy-Con reads those movement and turns those into on-screen action. That action is a robot you control with your whole body that mostly just punches things until they break or blow up, along with a couple other bite-sized ways to play around.
And that leads to one of the only downsides of Nintendo Labo: the games themselves. While it's fun to build the Toy-Cons and see how the creations come together, the gameplay that they facilitate can get pretty dry pretty quickly.
The fishing game is fun, but there are only about 10 different types of fish that you can catch. Driving around with the motorcycle Toy-Con is cool at first, twisting the handlebar to control your speed and leaning with the handlebars to control where you go, but it's a pretty barebones experience.
The robot Toy-Con took the longest to build by far and has the most variety in terms of minigames you can play with it, but they are each relatively shallow experiences compared to how interesting it is to built the backpack, visor, and attachments for your limbs.
It's so cool to see how everything turns from flat cardboard, a few straps, and strings into this full body controller with a responsive pulley system. So cool that it almost leaves the game itself feeling lackluster.
Not to mention you look goofy as hell with the whole get-up on.
But beyond the basic games is the Toy-Con Garage, which allows you to create your own experiences with some rudimentary coding. The Garage works with some of the Toy-Cons you've already built as well as extra pieces you can play around with the come included in the box.
The Garage just adds a little bit extra to every Toy-Con, and the freedom it gives you to mess around with your console and Toy-Cons makes the Labo experience feel a little more worth it.
What will be interesting to watch is how Nintendo iterates on Labo. These are only the first two kits, and Nintendo has hinted at more to come. While I can't see the building processes getting too much more interesting than they already are, the games themselves have a lot of room to grow.
Hopefully with future Labo kits, Nintendo can focus a bit more on making fun games that people will want to play for more than a few hours, or add some healthy competition in there to spice things up, which is what made the similarly basic Wii Sports game so popular.
The first two Nintendo Labo kits release on Friday for Nintendo Switch.
Topics Gaming Nintendo Nintendo Switch Reviews
