ARMS

The Joy-Con motion controls are the entire design. Swing to punch, tilt to move. You get maybe an evening out of the novelty before your arm gets tired.

ARMS knows exactly what it is: a fighting game built around a gimmick, not despite one. The characters are visually clean, the art style reads well on the Switch’s screen, and matches move fast enough that the control limitations don’t feel like problems. It commits completely to its one idea.

I played it for a while after launch. There’s something honest about a game that doesn’t pretend to be deeper than it actually is. But honesty and depth are different things. Strip away the novelty of the controls and you’re left with a fighting game that’s too simple for its own ambitions, controlled by a method too imprecise for what it’s asking you to do, held up only by the charm of the core concept.

That’s enough for a party game. It’s not enough for anything else, and maybe ARMS made peace with that a long time ago.