8 Most Disappointing Switch Games, Ranked

There’s a well-worn saying that happiness is reality minus expectations. For the eight Switch games below, reality fell well short of what people had imagined. A few earned their harsh reception, but others aren’t bad at all. They just weren’t what fans had hoped for. We’ve ordered them by how far each one drifted from its promise, starting with the mild letdowns and ending with the ones that stung most or felt hardest to justify at full price. Before you jump in, it’s worth lowering your expectations.

8. Princess Peach: Showtime! (2024)

The hope: A true star turn.

The reality: A gentle, low-stakes stage production.

Peach finally takes center stage in a theater packed with costume-driven performances, with roles that include a detective, a mermaid, and a swordfighter. If you adore Peach and love playing dress-up, as we do, the premise has real appeal. Reviewers mostly liked the way each outfit unlocked new abilities, yet they described the whole package as pretty, if shallow. Others pointed out that the adventure was brief and offered little challenge for a $60 asking price. A playthrough ran anywhere from four to ten hours, and the game omitted handy conveniences such as backtracking or skipping to a chosen point. It looked like it would be a rich, dynamic action-adventure, but most of the play came down to two buttons, A and B, handling very simple actions and jumps.

7. Mario Golf: Super Rush (2021)

The hope: A grander, more generous Mario Golf.

The reality: A package that felt sparser than the Game Boy Color original.

On paper, the concept is clever. Golf is normally a relaxed pastime, so what happens if you turn it into a race? Speed Golf delivers a fresh, high-energy twist by having you dash toward each hole while your rivals do the same. The real problem with Mario Golf: Super Rush was pretty much everything else. Developer Camelot Software Planning shipped it with just six courses and a brief adventure mode. Oddly, the studio also chose to drop the familiar timed-swing system in favor of something more random. Updates have since added to the game, but at launch it seemed skimpy next to the Game Boy Color’s Mario Golf.

6. Nintendo Switch Sports (2022)

The hope: The next Wii Sports.

The reality: Too few sports on day one.

Motion-controlled sports games are tricky to get right, and it’s harder still when Wii Sports, a hugely popular and expertly made game, set the benchmark for the entire genre. Nintendo Switch Sports arrived with six sports at $39.99. Golf, one of the five original Wii Sports mainstays, was missing from that lineup and showed up months afterward as a free update. The game also replaced Miis, another Wii Sports hallmark, with customizable “Sportsmates” avatars, and it leaned heavily on online play. A Switch 2 follow-up with 12 sports is due Oct. 22, but the original felt a lot like an overpriced demo that might as well have been bundled with the console.

5. Mario Strikers: Battle League (2022)

The hope: A complete, fully loaded Mario Strikers.

The reality: Soccer matches and very little around them.

Mario’s rowdy soccer spinoff has had a devoted following since its GameCube and Wii days, so excitement for Battle League ran high, especially with Next Level Games, the team behind Luigi’s Mansion 3, at the helm. The matches themselves play well enough, but the content surrounding them was slim. Metacritic users complained about the shortage of single-player content, and a few went as far as saying it launched with nothing meaningful at all. The earlier Mario Strikers titles were over-the-top, light on rules, and fast to pick up. They had no referees, plenty of items to hurl at opponents, and a charged “Super Strike” that counted as two goals. Mario Strikers Charged on the Wii added unique sidekicks and some of that console’s earliest online play. Compared with those, Battle League felt less like a thrilling Mario Strikers game and more like a soccer match wrapped in a menu.

4. Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz HD (2019)

The hope: A triumphant return.

The reality: Ten minigames left from the original fifty.

Banana Blitz was a Wii launch title in 2006 and was designed around the Wii Remote. Its 50 minigames shone when you flicked the remote to toss a dart in Monkey Darts or tilted it to steer your monkey around the course. When Sega produced the HD remake thirteen years later, it kept only ten of them. Monkey Bowling, Monkey Race, and Monkey Golf were all cut, and the controls were remapped to a conventional controller. Fans didn’t take it well. GameSpot said the surviving games ran from okay to atrocious. Many others wondered why Banana Blitz was picked to bring the series back at all (why not Super Monkey Ball 2?).

3. Sports Story (2022)

The hope: A broader, more varied Golf Story.

The reality: Golf, and not much beyond it.

Golf Story, Sidebar Games’ 2017 golf RPG about an underdog amateur sharpening his game, was a delightful surprise that earned fairly strong reviews. Its follow-up kept the hero and the humor but widened the roster of activities to include tennis, soccer, cricket, volleyball, BMX, fishing, and baseball. Some of those sports got far more attention than others. The golf is reasonably deep, for instance, while baseball amounts to little more than a batting cage, and the soccer portion rests on a handful of goal challenges. The takeaway is that Golf Story proved a single sport was plenty, provided it got enough of the spotlight.

2. Endless Ocean Luminous (2024)

The hope: A fresh scuba-diving tale.

The reality: 99 mysteries to clear before the story opens up.

The Wii’s two Endless Ocean games, released between 2007 and 2010, were soothing scuba-diving adventures. The 2024 revival sends you into a procedurally generated sea that you can explore online with up to 30 other players. That all sounds great, but the story mode brought a number of problems. Each mission stayed locked until you had scanned hundreds of fish, and the final few quests were reserved for players who had completed 99 “mysteries,” which were squares on a stone tablet that unlocked after tasks like reading snippets of lore. That gave a once-tranquil series a grindy feel that players didn’t enjoy. Some critics observed that Luminous stretched under an hour of story across more than 20 hours of play. The procedurally generated ocean may be endless in theory, but the plot certainly wasn’t.

1. 1-2-Switch (2017)

The hope: A pack-in title that came free with the console.

The reality: A full-price minigame collection.

1-2-Switch debuted alongside the brand-new Nintendo Switch to show off what the Joy-Cons could do. Its 28 minigames are meant to be played while looking at a real-life opponent rather than at a screen, and the lineup, which includes Table Tennis and Quick Draw, was clearly designed with that in mind. It would have been perfectly fine as a bundled extra, much like Wii Sports. Instead, Nintendo sold it at full price, and many players felt they’d paid real money for what was closer to a tech demo. It still sold respectably, with Nintendo reporting nearly a million copies shipped by April 2017, but critics weren’t kind. Metacritic gave it a 58, and its reputation as an expensive Joy-Con tutorial has proved impossible to shake.

Source: Polygon