Hands On with Nintendo Labo

We got a chance to play with Nintendo’s latest creation: Nintendo Labo! It’s a brand new way to interact with the Switch and it’s with something you’d have never thought was possible. You interact with the Nintendo Switch console with cardboard. The cardboard is customisable and you create differing designs, which Nintendo are calling ‘Toy-Cons”

We got a chance to take two of the differing editions of the Nintendo Labo, the Variety kit, which has things like fishing rod, motorbike handles and a piano more on that below!

Nintendo labo: Robot

We also got a chance to use the larger build of the two, a HUGE backpack which turned us into a Robot! The Robot is a backpack that utilises (cardboard) weights and cables to detect a users movement. In the game, you are a robot, which literally travels around a level and destroys stuff. Buildings, spaceships, cars, anything! You name it you can destroy it! Better yet, if you crouch down you transform into a car which has zappers on it to do your destroying for you! Want to fly? Well you can, simply move your arms to the side and your robot takes to the skies! Simply land on anything and punch downwards to destroy and gain as many points as you can!

The Toy Con’s both the Variety version and the Robot pack are going to be a hit with a young audience, they certainly made an impression on us! Simply because it was the element of building our own accessories which made us feel accomplished once we finished building and began to play! Even if the Robot one did take 3 hours it was 3 hours well spent!

Nintendo Labo: Variety Kit

So the Variety Kit, we had a go on three different games, the Motorbike game, Fishing and a party type game with the Toy Con House! We loved the Motorbike game, we all had a lot of fun whizzing around the various amounts of tracks available to you. All differing in difficulty, so if you get really good, give the difficult level a go! We were popping wheelies all over the track, everyone ate our dust! We tried the fishing game, which was fun, but we were a little disappointed that every time we tried to catch a big fish, the line broke! Maybe we should work on our fishing skills. Finally we took on the variety game with the “Toy Con House”. In this game, we’ll be honest, we were a little confused at first.

However, once we got it underway we had a lot of fun bowling, Nick wouldn’t put it down until he got a stirke!! We also loved the main screen where the ‘home’ had differing interactions each time you put the different accessories in it. For example the house ‘keys’ started different games and changed the time of day. Whereas the attachment with the strings made it into a ‘Portal’ esque type environment. Overall the Nintendo Labo Toy Con 1: Variety Kit was a lot of fun! We can’t wait to put the Piano together and make a hit tune!

Listen to Nick Bright’s thoughts on this when he took it for a spin here!

Purchase Nintendo Labo here:

Toy Con 1 Variety Edition

Toy Con 2 Robot Edition

Keep up to date with everything How To Kill An Hour by signing up to our newsletter by clicking here!