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Hyper Sports R (Switch) Hands-On Preview

by Daan Koopman - August 22, 2018, 8:00 am EDT
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Hey, remember Wii sports minigame collections? You know, the bad kind?

Bless Konami for keeping their multiplayer train rolling. After the success of Super Bomberman R, they made their direction for the Nintendo Switch very clear. So where do you go after a well selling game? Sports minigames of course. Would you expect anything else? In all sincerity though, I wasn’t impressed with Hyper Sports R at E3 2018. The game got a second chance now at Gamescom… and the prospects aren’t that good.

The new build at Gamescom focused on two things: game wide motion controls and more events. During my demo, I got to see five different track and field varieties which all come down to basically the same thing: Use running motions with the separated Joy-Con, and use the R-button to make a jump for it. Does it work? Absolutely. Is it actually exciting? Well, my interest dropped off really fast.

The other person I was playing it with was shrugging it off too. This isn’t the fault of the motion controls, however. The games weren’t flashy, exciting or really interesting takes of the sports. For the criticism that the Mario & Sonic games get, at least they are fun to play around with. Hyper Sports R tries to be semi-realistic, and it comes off as bland.

The only other sport available was Beach Volleyball. In the previous build, this was a non-playable video. At Gamescom, we got to team up for a doubles match and the motion controls aren’t well thought through. You needed to make ridiculous motions to block, throw or even pass the ball around. Naturally, this can be played with buttons, but that wasn’t the focus of the demo here.

Performance wise, it was a step down from the E3 build. The action was very stuttery and unpolished, as if they had to rush the demo to completion simply for the sake of showcasing it. There were tiny bits and pieces of ghosting, something I simply couldn’t understand. Hyper Sports R looks colourful at the very least.

In the end though, I just walked away bummed from Hyper Sports R. While the E3 demo wasn’t impressive, I did some hidden potential there. This new demo throws that straight out of the window, and it needed to do a lot to bring me back. There is still time for that as the game doesn’t have a solid release date.

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Game Profile

Genre Sports
Developer Konami
Players1 - 4

Worldwide Releases

na: Hyper Sports R
Release Cancelled
PublisherKonami
RatingEveryone
eu: Hyper Sports R
Release Cancelled
PublisherKonami
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