Reviews for Drag x Drive, Nintendo’s newest first-party Switch 2 game, went live across the web earlier today, and the overall consensus seems to be: Meh. By itself, that wouldn’t be much of a story, but Drag x Drive’s low review scores mean that two out of the five lowest-rated Switch 2 games on Metacritic were published by Nintendo.
On August 13, the embargo dropped for Drag x Drive reviews, and numerous outlets began posting their critical appraisals of the arcade-y wheelchair basketball game. Drag x Drive, which launches on Thursday, isn’t a big hit with critics. Many found it too complicated for casual players, but not deep enough to keep experienced players hooked. Others complained that the controls, which rely heavily on the new Joy-Cons’ mouse functionality, are tedious and a pain to use, and even once you’ve mastered them, the 3v3 sports game is just not very exciting to play or look at. So it’s not a surprise that, as of 2:30 PM EST, Drag x Drive has a lukewarm 62 out of 100 rating on Metacritic and places it in close proximity to another Nintendo-published Switch 2 game.
That other game is Switch 2 launch title Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour, a game that many critics called a glorified tutorial and tech demo hidden behind a paywall. And while it has some fans, it boasts a low overall Metacritic score of 54. Yikes. That score places it right next to Drag x Drive on the worst-reviewed Switch 2 games list on Metacritic. The only game with a worse aggregated score than those two titles is Bandai Namco’s Tamagotchi Plaza.
So what can we take from this? Well, first off, it should be noted that over the next few months and years, as more games flood the Switch 2, I expect these low-rated Nintendo games to float higher up the list as truly awful garbage lands on the console. But for now, I think it reinforces the fact that the Switch 2 is a great console with perhaps the worst launch line-up of exclusive games I’ve seen from Nintendo in a long time.
It’s also interesting that both of these poorly received Nintendo games are new titles not connected to a franchise and focused heavily on the more gimmicky features of the Switch 2 hardware. In 2025, it seems a lot of critics and players are done waggling controllers or caring about weird features that very few games will use at all. That’s bad news for Drag x Drive and Welcome Tour, but it suggests that Nintendo made the right call with its new console. Instead of going for a new, weird gimmick like the Wii U, Virtual Boy, or 3DS, this time around Nintendo just made the same console again, but bigger, better, and faster. Seeing how well it has sold so far and how poorly people are reacting to gimmicks, this was likely a smart move.
