Hyper Sports R E3 2018 Preview

Hyper Sports R is Konami's take on modern sports with this Nintendo Switch only release. It takes aim to emulate the old school Konami sports, but on a modern platform. We were shown this with a quick video presentation of their history in sporting games. It does this emulation in a special style as they claim only the motion controls of the Switch could make this possible, they're generally right there. This will also fill a niche space left over by the lack of Nintendo having a first party sports package like they did with the Wii and WiiU.

I was able to get hands-on time with the game while at E3 2018 to play a number of the modes and get an idea of what this is all about. Everything wasn't complete, so this was really just a tease. The largest lean towards that was the Volleyball which you could just watch bots play, I didn't get the point of including that without letting us play. I say this as it's the only directly competitive mode that was present, everything else was more single run based. I really wanted to see their more complex team focused events.

Hyper Sports R was interesting to play and I feel it'll settle well with the casual crowd. I was able to play some track and field type sports such as Javelin, sprinting and jumping. These events required a mix of motion movement with the Joy-Cons and some quick precision based on what event I was playing. For the Javelin I had to be careful to hit just the right spot so that I would throw it properly and get a good distance. With that, I actually did quite well though fairly short of the developer's target to beat.

I thought the visuals were great for the game, they have a fun style and look somewhat realistic in style. The sporting events seem well developed and this could be a really fun package assuming multiple sports are included. There are even options for local play if you split the Joy-Cons which is neat. I look forward to seeing the full package and getting a better idea of just how many sports are included within this compilation. A finally mention is this was displayed docked only for the setup.

Read our Forza Horizon 4 E3 Preview
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