As often as I’ve bemoaned the lack of a greater number of sports titles in the Switch eShop, I can’t say that I ever had tournament Ping Pong in mind as a possibility to help fill the void. Given the simplicity of the game, even in real life, I can see where there could be a novelty factor to it in a video game form, but I’ll admit that I was skeptical loading it up. Now, having spent some time with it, I’ll say that my concerns with how the game would end up weren’t far off the mark.

The best comparison I can think of in terms of what this title feels like it was trying to emulate to some degree, is the classic Punch-Out. Each of the competitors in the game has their own distinctive personality, and many of them then have a signature move at their disposal to help make them a formidable foe. Gameplay is actually quite simple in practice, with you both moving statically between the left, center, and right positions at the table, and only being able to choose between 3 ways of hitting the ball to the other side in the same manner. The further you go this all gets to be quite crucial as not only will you want to hit the ball to a different position than your opponent is standing in, making them waste energy by moving, you’ll also tend to be penalized with quicker return hits if you make the mistake of knocking the ball right to them.

In principle, perhaps this could have worked out at a more simple level, though the base game formula doesn’t inherently leave room for much in the way of ultimate variety, outside of the use of specials to add some flavor. The problem though is that the ball outright moves in an odd way, and even after repeatedly trying to come up with different approaches that would improve my success at hitting it, I continued to struggle. 

Considering the sheer number of action games I’ve played over the years, let alone pretty well every week, I can confidently say that this is one of the most unnecessarily difficult “simple” games I’ve played like this. While the ball movement does nothing to help, it feels like the window of opportunity to hit it is particularly narrow, so even when you feel like you’ve got the rhythm of a volley down it feels like any given hit you attempt could end up being a bust. Combine that with an overall structure that simply doesn’t have much variety to offer, and this simply doesn’t feel like an experience I’d recommend to almost anyone.