As a true believer in the power of leveraging roguelike elements to enhance just about any style of gameplay, it has been fun to see such a wide variety of titles embracing them. One genre that has been a little late to the party has been sports titles, though given the fact that their representation on the Switch isn’t all that great, it’s possible we’re just seeing a portion of what’s out there. But rather than this being an action-driven affair, the developers of Smash it Wild have chosen to go a more strategic route, and the results at least work fairly well for the most part.

Playing through matches of 3-on-3 volleyball, you’ll need to understand the general dynamics and strengths of each team you work with, and then try to do your best to continue to choose upgrades for your players to continue to make them stronger. I’ll admit that some of the nuances of strategy took some time to wrap my arms around, but with each match I tended to feel more confident in what I needed to be looking out for, and to create opportunities by targeting the other team’s players and being sure to keep my team spread out in order to keep the opposition from scoring points.

Part of the challenge here though is that there’s simply a lot going on in terms of overall strategy and it only feels like a minor portion of the underlying rules are explained. You do go through an early in-game tutorial that lays out quite a number of key concepts, but while you can have success by merely getting the gist of what’s going on, that doesn’t always equate to your wins being satisfying. Between the loads of status modifiers on attacks from both teams, relics whose benefits don’t always feel clear, and what can feel like limited control over which team members are capable of getting upgrades at times, there’s absolutely room for frustration. Throw in the fact that it’s unclear specifically what would keep you coming back for more once you’ve had some successes and unlocked more teams, and while there’s appeal here, this lacks in the compulsive need to play more that its roguelike peers often have.