Ring Fit Adventure (Nintendo Switch) Review

It has become somewhat customary for Nintendo to not announce a game until it is absolutely sure about the final product. As such the Japanese video game giant often doesn't have a long lead time from announcement to release, yet there are a number of exceptions to this rule, particularly with titles such as The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and now Metroid Prime 4, however Nintendo allowed a mere five weeks to pass for Ring Fit Adventure. Such a tight schedule would leave the general public to deliberate on the likelihood that this is a rushed title.

Hopefully Cubed3's preview allayed any fears of this. Ring Fit Adventure puts together a fitness regime that has a number of turn-based RPG elements, coupled with a high intense workout, and a family friendly style of presentation that will appeal to a great number of people in the casual audience. Out of the box is the Ring-Con, a hardened plastic Pilates ring that can be squeezed, stretched and twisted.

The Ring-Con itself is comfortable to grip, and incredibly resistive - there are padded grips that are on the side and the right joy-con is connected at the top. Accompanying this is a Velcro Leg-Strap which houses the left Joycon, and is attached to the left thigh. This tracks all leg movements such as running, squatting, core exercises and yoga poses. It might even be worthwhile to have a towel handy due to the amount of running that is required to get through the large number of stages to hand. Even if the running doesn't work up a sweat, then the sheer amount of squeezing on the Ring-Con will get the arms to ache.

During the starting warm up questions, a number of personal questions are asked to help calibrate the experience, such as age, gender, weight as well as a number of movements to help test that the Ring-con and leg strap are correctly connected. A combination of skills is going to be needed to traverse the vast 20 worlds in Ring Fit Adventure. After the self-created avatar accidently releases the main antagonist, Dragaux, they discover Ring, the titular name of the sidekick to the adventure. Thus begins the quest to track down Draguax.

Graphically, Ring Fit Adventure has a highly colourful aesthetic, and strangely catchy background music. The fun part is that it is quite easy to be absorbed into the activities without realising that there is even exercise involved. Running on the spot in real life translates this action to the screen, which will get the on-screen character to move through 3D environments in an on-rails capacity. Alongside the running track are a number of obstacles that can either be shot with a gust of wind by squeezing the Ring-Con or stretching the ring to inhale various pick-ups.

Fighting enemies is often done by utilising the RPG elements in which a turn-based attack system is used. Attacking the enemy is done by launching a choice of a number of colour coded exercises, of which matching the colour of the exercise to the colour of the enemy will expose its weakness. This diversity in gameplay, in a fitness game no less, is actually a novel method to encourage players to try out a number of fitness-based exercises to help attack an enemy. The chance in pace is also somewhat warranted as triggering a battle means that there is no need to keep continuously jogging on the spot.

Outside of the adventure mode is a quick play option which features a number of additional mini-games that ideally hold people around for a little bit longer than they had thought. Quick play mode allows for simple challenges, traditional mini-games, and to create self-made workouts by combining individual exercises and putting it into a custom mode. It is a worthy addition to help show a number of diverse ways that the Ring-Con could be put to use.

Perhaps a massive oversight for Nintendo is that Ring Fit Adventure is not completely suited for the Nintendo Switch Lite. It can be played, but will require separate joy-cons and also for the player to use the table top mode for the Switch. The massive downfall is that it can be very difficult to execute the moves if the action cannot be seen on such a small screen. On the other hand, Nintendo have been very thoughtful for those living in shared accommodated or sensitive neighbours with Silent mode. Silent mode allows for the system to be cheesed slightly, but only having to lightly squat to run, which reduces the noise required to run.