Drag x Drive Hands-On Impressions – Access-Ability

Over the past few months, I’ve had a couple of opportunities to go hands-on with Drag X Drive, Nintendo’s first party developed multiplayer sports game inspired by the real world sport of Wheelchair Basketball. I played a few rounds at a preview event for the Switch 2 back in April of this year, and got some further time with the game this past weekend when a public demo called the Global Jam took place over a number of four hour timeslots.

While I did not receive review code for the game, I do feel like I’ve played enough of the core gameplay mode to have a pretty good idea how I feel about Drag X Drive. This is not a review of the complete game, there’s for example side activities shown in some of the trailers that were not present in the Global Jam demo, but the impression I get is that the core 3V3 online matches are going to be the main draw of the game, and I’ve spent enough time playing those to have formed a pretty strong opinion of how I feel about this upcoming release.

At its core, Drag X Drive is a fast paced multiplayer basketball game. Matches last three minutes, as two teams of three players attempt to score points. If your team has the ball they need to take a shot at scoring within 14 seconds or forfeit possession, encouraging the creation of opportunities to intercept the ball.

If you successfully score points, the team who were scored against get some breathing room, as the scoring team is pushed away beyond the three point scoring line, giving the scored against team space to collect the ball and make the first offensive play of the new set.

You get two points for a successful goal within the circle around the net, three points for a shot outside of the circle, and additional fractions of points if you do a trick as part of scoring, such as spinning in the air off of the court edge half pipe before making your shot on goal.

You can force the opposing team to drop the ball by engaging in head-on collisions, or intercept the ball through positioning yourself in the path of an attempted pass between players.

Gameplay in Drag X Drive is motion based, with players holding a pair of Joy-Con 2 controllers and pushing them forward and backward to emulate pushing the wheels of a wheelchair. Pushing both controllers forward pushes you forward, both back pushes you back, and alternating directions causes you to turn sharply.

When you’re lined up for a shot on net, you lift a controller up and mimic a throwing motion. Success is to my understanding not based on the precision accuracy of your throwing motion, and much more to do with whether you’re lined up straight facing the net, and how far from the net you are, as well as the stats of your character class.

The default character class when you boot up the game is Forward, a class with overall middling stats in strength, rebound, and speed. The Centre class maxes out strength and rebound, but reduces its speed to minimum. The Guard class has terrible rebound and strength, but maximum quickness.

Having played around with all three classes, they don’t feel terribly well balanced. I might be missing something, but strength and rebound are pretty vital if you want to knock the ball out of the opposing players hands and take shots at the net, and the drop in speed experienced by the centre class feels in practice like a way smaller sacrifice than the cuts that get made to the Guard class. Dropping to minimum speed doesn’t feel like it slows you down much, but dropping strength and rebound makes it feel like you can’t nearly as reliably get control of the ball from the opposing team if they’ve taken possession.

Getting into accessibility impressions, I want to start with something positive – Drag X Drive does feature an implementation of high contrast mode, active by default, that helps identify which players are friend or foe. Enemy players are given a red outline, allied players a blue outline, and the ball is highlighted the colour of the currently controlling team, even when it’s not on screen. If the ball is out of your field of view, an indicator will appear at the screen’s edge to help you identify where to find the ball, and who controls it at that moment in time.

While I do really appreciate this high contrast mode being there, I believe a first for a Nintendo first party title, it’s not without its limitations.

The colours of player highlights, at least in the Global Jam, cannot be changed from their default red and blue. There’s a few groups of players that could be an issue for, perhaps most notably those with Protanopia, a type of colourblindness which can cause difficulty distinguishing between reds and blues.

Additionally, I would really love to see Nintendo update this game with the option to fully highlight the enemy team players in block solid colour, rather than just putting a coloured highlight around their edges. Players can customise their character’s appearance in Drag X Drive, and there is overlap between the default highlight colours and some of the player customisation colours. In multiplayer the highlight around your own team is always blue and the enemy team’s highlight is always red, but if members of your team think that red is a cool colour and decided to customis their appearance to be dressed in all red, you now have a blue outline around an all red character and have to instantly in the heat of battle read them as being blue despite that being the less prevalent colour on their character.

Either providing an option for teams to be highlighted in full block colour rather than outlines, or to customise outlines colours to less commonly selected character customisation choices, would both go a long way to making this high contrast mode implementation more actively useful.

Drag X Drive also features very little in the way of settings menu options, with a scoreboard display toggle, ball, teammates, and opponent indicators, camera distance alteration, camera inversion, and menu control options only.

Getting to the core gameplay, let’s talk in depth about the game’s very rigidly defined control scheme.

Drag X Drive has no options to alter its default control scheme – Players hold two sideways Joy-Con 2 controllers in mouse mode, and push them forward and back to mimic the movements of pushing the wheels on a wheelchair. There’s no alternative control scheme, meaning that you can’t play the game in handheld mode, or using a pro controller, or perhaps most importantly with the Hori Flex accessibility controller.

The mouse mode Joy-Cons do a pretty impressive job of reading input motions on a variety of materials, even those with minimal visible detail such as plain black leggings. I found the game most comfortable to play for long periods of time on my legs, but it should be noted that if you’re wearing more loose fitting legwear you may find that you have issues with fabric moving or bunching up in ways that make playing on your legs less effective.

When playing on surfaces at more raised heights, such as a table, the game was a lot more exhausting and painful for me to play. At the Switch 2 preview event in London for example I was required to use both Joy-Con mice on the table, and had a worse experience than playing on my legs at home this past weekend. The motions involved feel most natural in my experience with arms extended to a height roughly in line with where wheels would be if actually pushing the wheels of a wheelchair. While I can’t speak for anyone else’s experience, I do think that a person’s first impressions of this game could be wildly different depending on the height and position of the surface they attempt to play on.

The Switch 2 Joy-Cons, while larger than the Joy-Cons of the original Switch, are still fairly narrow, and can cause some hand cramp issues during play. The way this game requires players to grip their controllers and engage in rapid sweeping movements is definitely a little intense on the hands, and is going to be a barrier for some players.

I personally had a better experience playing Drag X Drive using a pair of 3D printed plastic mouse grips for the Joy-Con, making them more similar in width to a traditional PC mouse when gripped. I did have to get over a mental barrier when making throws with the ball toward the net, as holding something shaped more like a mouse mentally got in the way of my muscle memory for using the controller as a motion input for throws, but it didn’t take long to feel more natural, and my lack of hand cramp made the choice worthwhile.

There is no getting around the fact that this game is going to be, for a lot of disabled players, fairly inaccessible. For a game whose design is rooted in representing the experience of disabled athletes, that fact is inevitably going to feel a little jarring while playing.

I get what Drag X Drive is – It fundamentally exists to be a mechanical showcase for the Switch 2, an example of what its new controller technology can do. The catch is, like Arms or Let’s Go Pikachu and Eevee, this feels like Nintendo putting a desire to mandate a new control innovation ahead of the needs of disabled players.

While playing Drag X Drive, I couldn’t help thinking about Switch 1 launch window title Arms, and the similarities in these two games’ positions in each console’s launch window. Arms did support non motion controls, but it didn’t advertise that fact, showing itself in promotional materials to be a motion control specific game. It was pitched as the launch showcase of Switch 1 motion controls, and in many ways I do believe its public perception as a motion control focused title hurt its perception as a serious or accessible competitive game.

In the same year Pokémon Let’s Go Pikachu and Eevee was released, with mandatory motion controls when played docked on the TV. That game frustratingly had a non motion control scheme, but it was exclusive to handheld play. When asked why, Game Freak director Junichi Masuda was pretty open about the fact that it was a conscious decision, born out of fear that if players were able to choose whether or not to use motion controls, they would choose not to. He wanted the game to be played a specific way, he wanted people to have this experience of throwing a Pokéball, and took away access to an already programmed more accessible alternative control scheme to ensure that people didn’t sidestep his vision for what play of this game would look like.

I think about both of these examples when playing Drag X Drive, and can’t help but feel like this game’s controls might come from a similar design philosophy – a fear that if a non-motion control scheme was offered to players they might prefer it, or find it more competitively viable, and opt not to control the game the way that Nintendo envisioned it being meant to be played.

The result is a game that, while fun, is going to be physically exhausting, painful or in some cases completely inaccessible for a lot of players with different types of disabilities. For a game that feels like a celebration of a real world sport played in large part by disabled athletes, it does feel unavoidably disappointing that I can’t sit here writing positively about the game finding creative solutions to its core accessibility barriers.

But here’s the thing, I do really enjoy Drag X Drive, despite it seeming from my current experience like a pretty bare bones game. I’m getting on decently playing it, despite my frustration in not being able to play in handheld mode while watching TV. I wish it weren’t such a dedicated, Docked TV experience, but when I’m playing it I do find it a lot of fun. I just can’t ignore the access barriers present in the context of a game that so heavily uses the aesthetics of disability.

Here’s one of the most memorable moments I had during the Global Jam demo – It was seconds from the end of the match and my team was two points behind. I got right up to the edge of the three point line and threw my shot. The timer ended mid arc, time slowed down. The ball barely made it in, scoring three points and stealing the win after the buzzer had already called time. Moments like that are really satisfying.

If you play with players who are willing to pass the ball, the small court size and low player count per team can make passes devastating, particularly if you have one player lined up well on the three point line who can trust their teammates to get an opening to dash the ball to them for a quick shot on net.

I appreciate the customisation options available in the demo, and hope there’s more of them than can be unlocked in the full game, ideally without relying on microtransaction payments.

I do worry that, even at a relatively low price, Drag X Drive being a paid game rather than a free to play title is going to hurt its playerbase size. Don’t get me wrong, this is my preference. I would rather pay a little bit of money and have a game that isn’t full of microtransactions, but it’s a game that most directly in gameplay feels comparable to something like Rocket League, and the fact it costs money and requires players to use a motion based input scheme feels like it’s going to reduce the scope of its appeal. I hope I’m wrong, because there is a really fun core experience here that I hope survives for a while.

I also really want to see a commitment from Nintendo for this game to evolve over time – I suspect the default game mode will only keep its appeal for so long. Will we see other game modesadded ? A league? Ranked leaderboards? Limited time events? These are the things I feel like will be needed to keep this game healthy, and I hope we see some sign of that pretty close to launch.

Ultimately, I do really like the way this game controls. The controls feel highly intuitive if you’re aware of how wheelchairs control, and I love the way that the controllers click as you push them, emulating the turning of the spokes on the wheels. I love that we have a game that translates wheelchair basketball into a fast paced competitive video game, and I do want to put enough time into this game to get legitimately competitively good at it if I can.

Drag X Drive is a lot of fun, I just wish that fun was more accessible to more groups of disabled players.