| Drag x Drive | |||
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| Gameplay & Story | Release Date | DLC & Pre-Order | Review |
Drag x Drive is a game that lets you duke it out in 3v3 wheelchair basketball matches! Read our review to see what it did well, what it didn't do well, and if it's worth buying.
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Drag x Drive Review Overview
What is Drag x Drive?
Drag x Drive is a 3v3 basketball game developed and published by Nintendo for the Nintendo Switch 2, launched on August 14, 2025. Positioned as a brand-new IP, it stands among the early first-party exclusives for the new console.
The game pits players in neon-lit arenas in fast-paced 3-on-3 wheelchair basketball matches. Here, players aim to score more points than their opponents. Both local and online multiplayer are supported, with up to six players able to compete.
The main feature of the game is its use of the Switch 2’s dual Joy-Con 2 mouse-mode controls. Each Joy-Con functions like a computer mouse. Pushing both forward moves the chair, one pushes pivots, and flicking simulates shooting. These motion-haptic inputs mimic the feel of pushing a wheelchair and shooting a basketball.
Drag x Drive features:
⚫︎ 3-on-3 Basketball
⚫︎ Tricks and Acrobatics on the Court
⚫︎ Innovative Motion Controls
⚫︎ Online Play
⚫︎ Mini-Games and Challenges
⚫︎ Makes Use of Joy-Con 2’s Haptic Feedback
For more gameplay details, read everything we know about Drag x Drive’s gameplay and story.
 Switch 2 |
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| Price | $19.99 | ||||
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Drag x Drive Pros & Cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
 Makes Good Use of the Oft-Ignored Switch 2 Mouse Mode Fun with Groups of People |
Lifeless Characters and Hub World Lack of Variety in Content Limited Customization Options for Player Avatars |
Drag x Drive Overall Score - 48/100
Drag x Drive has a lot of potential. The core basketball gameplay is genuinely fun, with solid controls that make online matches feel competitive and engaging. However, the game's excellent mechanics are hampered by a lifeless presentation and a severe lack of content. There’s definitely a good game buried in here somewhere; it’s just still waiting for Nintendo to dig it out.
Drag x Drive Story - 3/10
Nothing. The game has no real story or characters to speak of. The hub world, unironically named "Park," is as bland as its name suggests. The same goes for the player characters, which are essentially just robots in wheelchairs. You can try to inject some personality by customizing your robot’s helmet and color scheme, but the options are pretty limited. The closest thing you get to a fun moment with your characters here is busting out some decade-old moves, like a dab.
Drag x Drive Gameplay - 6/10
The controls are clever and surprisingly fun once you get into the flow. Unfortunately, that fun is held back by awkward hardware ergonomics and a barren hub area with little to do. What's really a shame is that there's enough depth to keep matches interesting for a while, but not enough surrounding content to make you want to stick around long-term.
Drag x Drive Visuals - 4/10
Drag x Drive isn’t a looker, either. It runs as well as you’d expect a Nintendo Switch 2 game to. It has a smooth and consistent framerate, even in tabletop mode, and sinking a shot or making a buzzer beat have satisfying effects. But beyond these, there’s not much to note. The robot designs are uninspired, limited customization makes them feel impersonal, and the hub world is disappointingly gray. It’s a sad sight, considering that this is made by Nintendo, whose games are almost always full of color.
Drag x Drive Audio - 5/10
The audio design, much like the visuals, is decent but uninspired. It's not bad per se, and it captures the expected street basketball sounds with a hip-hop and Nintendo flair, but the soundtrack itself lacks variety. There isn’t even a memorable main theme, like the one in Arms. The overall audio experience is serviceable but ultimately forgettable.
Drag x Drive Value for Money - 6/10
At $20, it’s cheap enough to take a chance on, but also light enough on content that you might burn through everything in just a couple of hours. What’s here can be fun, especially with friends, but with so little variety, it's unlikely you'll return to it after the first playthrough unless it's to show it off as a novelty.
Drag x Drive Review: Dragging, and Driving Me Insane
Not that you needed me to point this out, but Nintendo’s no stranger to strange. After all, this is the same company that once sold us cardboard pianos, fishing rods, and robot backpacks under the banner of Nintendo Labo, where you, quite literally, could slap together a pile of pre-cut corrugated cardboard, slide your Switch in, and somehow call it a great time. Compared to that, Drag x Drive doesn’t even scratch the surface of Nintendo’s weirdest moments. Sure, it’s a three-on-three basketball game with robots on wheelchairs, something not entirely unfamiliar to those who tune in to the Paralympics, but if games like Rocket League and Super Mario Kart on the SNES taught us anything, it's that mashing up an unconventional idea with a sport can work well.
Drag x Drive first burst into view during the April 2025 Nintendo Direct as one of the Switch 2’s earliest exclusives. It’s a sports game designed to put the Joy-Con 2’s mouse mode on full display. Nintendo leaned hard into this gimmick of theirs, asking players to literally slide their Joy-Cons across a surface to roll, pivot, and shoot.
However, although Drag x Drive can be fun, it feels more like a very polished tech demo than a fully-fleshed out game. Its main purpose seems to be justifying the Switch 2’s new mouse mode feature, something only a handful of games currently support, and even fewer use as their definitive control method. The result is a title that, despite having its moments, comes across as sparse and visually bland, hardly the kind of imaginative flair that usually defines Nintendo’s work.
Literally Drag the Joy-Cons to Drive
The heart and soul of Drag x Drive lies in its wholehearted embrace of the Switch 2’s most eyebrow-raising feature: mouse mode. This is the kind of gimmick Nintendo loves to build entire games around. And while it sounds as absurd as the Wii’s motion controls did back in 2006, it works surprisingly well in practice. And to Nintendo EPD’s credit, the control scheme feels more intuitive than it has any right to, considering the hardware they were working with—more on that later.
Here, you physically drag your Joy-Con 2 controllers across a flat surface to drive around the basketball court. It’s as literal as it sounds: push both controllers across a flat surface to move forward, pull back to reverse, drag the right to turn left, drag the left to turn right. Passing the ball is handled with a simultaneous press of L and R, while braking is split between L2 and R2 for the left and right wheels respectively. If you want to shoot the ball, all you need to do is give one controller a quick flick and watch the ball sail, hopefully, toward the hoop. Standard scoring rules apply: three points from beyond the arc, two from inside.
Where Drag x Drive veers off the beaten basketball path is in its tricks. Certain maneuvers grant small style bonuses to your score. 0.1 for a basic trick like pulling off a bunny hop before a shot, and 0.2 for a more daring move like a dunk. On paper, those decimal points don’t sound much, but stack enough of them in a close match, and you’ll quickly realize how much they matter. In fact, some games come down to who’s better at milking these micro-plays rather than who dominates the scoreboard in the traditional sense.
It’s nice, too, that the tricks themselves aren’t just for show. Bunny hops, for example, have defensive utility. You can use them to leap over a cluster of opponents, or even to intercept an incoming shot. On the higher difficulties, the AI has clearly read the same playbook, as they pull off trick shots almost constantly while sticking to you like glue. They’ll work to box you out, isolate you from teammates, and bait you into moving to a particular side of the court. It makes matches feel like more than a simple exchange of passes and shots.
Nintendo Land, This is Not
I do recommend taking Drag x Drive online whenever you can. The game’s bot opponents are more than capable of making you mash the B button out of sheer frustration, sure, but your AI teammates… not so much. Against high-level bots, it’s like you and your squad are playing in entirely different leagues. Opponents will pass back and forth, set up blocks, and leap to intercept your shots. Your teammates, on the other hand, will often move at the slowest possible pace to line up a bunny hop trick shot only to get swarmed and stripped of the ball.
With five other friends in a private lobby or even strangers in public rooms, you can actually coordinate using GameChat and plan out real strategies. It’s something you can never do in single-player. However, it’s quite baffling why you can’t team up with just one or two friends and matchmake with randoms to fill the rest. Nintendo has never been the gold standard for online play, but it’s 2025. At this point, the inability to form a partial squad for a sports game feels less like an oversight and more like a relic of an earlier era they’ve refused to let go of.
Outside of matches, though, there’s really not a whole lot going on. The Park, your hub area, is essentially a big space that exists because sports games are expected to have one now. Yes, there are scattered challenges, usually point-A-to-point-B missions with a timer, some hoop-shooting, and the occasional dodge of oversized jump ropes or traffic cones. They reward you with trophies that unlock new helmets, but the difficulty curve is so flat you can clear most of them in a couple of tries. After two or three hours, you’ll have seen pretty much everything the Park has to offer.
You can take the Park online with up to 12 players, which at least makes it livelier. Competing for the best times on certain challenges earns you gold rings for bragging rights, and there’s a small thrill in seeing your name at the top of the leaderboard. But most sessions devolve into informal pickup games or players hanging around watching others play.
And that’s really my problem with Drag x Drive. Beyond the court, there’s very little to keep you entertained. Completing challenges only unlocks tougher bots or helmets, and with no achievement system to chase, the competitive spirit the basketball mode thrives on just fizzles out. After just a few hours of grinding the same obstacle courses, I found myself wondering why I wasn’t playing something else, like Mario Kart or Super Smash Bros., anything with more variety and staying power.
The weirdest part is that this is Nintendo we’re talking about. They’re the same company that developed Arms, a game that, for all its flaws, is essentially a way to showcase the Switch’s detachable Joy-Cons. That game was bursting with creativity and character, so much so that no one could predict who its Super Smash Bros. representative would be, as there were just too many fan favorites. In contrast, Drag x Drive nails its central gimmick but wraps it in a package so barebones that it feels more like an extended tech demo.
Mouse Mode is Just Awkward In General
One of my biggest issues with Drag x Drive’s controls isn’t in how they’re implemented in-game—Nintendo EPD actually did a commendable job with what they had—it’s the inherent awkwardness of the Switch 2’s mouse mode itself. Like I mentioned in my review of the Switch 2 console, the design of the Joy-Con 2 just doesn’t lend itself to this style of play. They’re slimmer than a regular computer mouse, which means there’s no comfortable way to grip them in mouse mode for extended sessions.
There’s simply not enough surface area for my fingers and palms to rest on naturally. If I rest my index and middle fingers on the triggers, like I would with a regular house, the pace and physicality of Drag x Drive make accidental presses inevitable. The game is just too fast and too demanding for that grip to be practical. After a couple of unwanted swerves caused by my own fingers betraying me, I settled into using my index finger for both the L/R and L2/R2 inputs. It’s not an ideal setup, having to shift my fingers between two sets of buttons is rather slow against high-level opponents, but I did find a rhythm with it. Still, the fact that I had to rethink my grip entirely just to make the game somewhat comfortable is telling.
This really isn’t something I can chalk up as Drag x Drive’s fault entirely, but it does expose a weakness in the overall control scheme. It’s not the first time Nintendo has had this problem. The Wii’s motion controls were revolutionary back in 2006, but they could be tiring over long sessions. Mouse mode on the Switch 2 has a similar issue. It’s fun in bursts, but sustained play starts to wear on you.
This may be the reason Nintendo has so far reserved mouse mode for short, self-contained experiences, like quick mini-games in Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour, Super Mario Party Jamboree TV, or Bravely Default: Flying Fairy HD Remaster. In all those cases, you only use mouse mode for a few minutes at a time. In Drag x Drive, you’re expected to keep your wrists sliding across a table or your lap for entire matches, and that adds up.
Of course, part of the appeal here is that physicality. Sliding your controllers around makes you feel connected to the movement on screen in a way thumbsticks never could. This is especially true because of the haptic feedback, where you can actually feel the click of your wheels in your hands. However, the more you push your movements to be faster and sharper, the more likely you are to notice that your wrists and fingers aren’t thrilled about it.
Is Drag x Drive Worth It?
If You Have $20 to Drag and Drive to a Shredder
Drag x Drive costs only $20, which, in the current Nintendo economy, is almost a bargain. Compared to the $70-$80 games that never see a sale sticker, it’s nice to see something at this price point. But the value proposition is a two-way street. Yes, it’s cheaper, but you’re also getting less. Much, much less.
That’s a real shame here, because buried in this gray, personality-deprived package is a game with enormous potential. The control scheme is simple yet clever and lays the groundwork for something far more compelling. With the right support, Drag x Drive could have been what Arms wanted to be back in 2017: a competitive Nintendo sports title with esports viability. However, almost everything around the game seems determined to work against it.
The Switch 2’s mouse mode is awkward to hold for long stretches, and your entire game is built around it, that awkwardness can hurt wrists. A good match, too, will have you sliding and flicking with constant intensity, but the controller shape doesn’t reward that kind of extended gameplay. Add in the lack of meaningful single-player content, a barebones hub world, and limited online matchmaking options, and it’s like the game’s best ideas are trapped inside a box of its own making.
I can’t help but wish Nintendo sees the potential here and decides to do something with it, whether that’s a more fleshed out sequel, or at the very least, a DLC that patches over the more glaring issues. Right now, though, Drag x Drive is a promising experiment left to fend for itself.
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| Price | $19.99 | ||||
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Drag x Drive FAQ
Does Drag x Drive Have a Demo?
No, Drag x Drive doesn't have a demo. However, it did have a free online test session called Drag x Drive: Global Jam for Nintendo Switch Online subscribers. This session took place the weekend before the game's release, with three four-hour sessions happening on August 9th and 10th.
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Drag x Drive Product Information
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| Title | DRAG X DRIVE |
|---|---|
| Release Date | August 14, 2025 |
| Developer | Nintendo EPD |
| Publisher | Nintendo |
| Supported Platforms | Nintendo Switch 2 |
| Genre | Sports, Simulation |
| Number of Players | 6 Players (Online 3v3) 12 Players (Online Hub) |
| ESRB Rating | PEGI 3 ESRB E |
| Official Website | Drag x Drive Website |
