One category of games I’ve enjoyed greatly in this generation is what I’d define as the weirdo titles, ones that don’t conform easily to any mold or in general simply don’t take themselves seriously. Mix that with my past playing in bands from Elementary School through all of college, and it seems obvious that the offbeat musical extravaganza that was Trombone Champ would be a great match. The thing is, even modest success will inevitably invite imitation, and thus we have Disaster Band making its way to the Switch.

On the positive side, what Disaster Band does offer that Trombone Champ doesn’t is cross-platform online play. However, experience says that unless you have friends with the game remotely to play with, that is unlikely to result in much sustained fun. There are various instruments and styles of control to choose from, which can be nice options, but I’d say that only a subset of them are likely to be used, the rest are either just novel or not great. Though the game only comes with what pretty quickly feels like a thin lineup of 20 songs, there is the promise of community support adding more… except that isn’t available on the Switch.

The result, unfortunately, ends up feeling like a lesser version of Trombone Champ, unable to best it in any category outside of its online play, and struggling like a younger sibling to keep up but never getting there. It isn’t as polished, it doesn’t have as much heart, it didn’t make me laugh as much, and even the factoids it displays while loading things failed to live up to the original. Whether fair or not, that leaves the feel of this merely being an imitator rather than any sort of innovator, and given the pretty humble asking price for the OG there’s little reason to pick this up instead.