Author: Eric Ravenscraft / Source: reviewgeek.com
Nintendo wants to sell you cardboard and, against all odds, we’re on board with this proposition. The Nintendo Labo kit is as fun as it is absurd and it might even teach your kids a thing or two.
It’s easy to poke fun at what Nintendo Labo is. The gaming company wants to charge $70 (at least!
) for a cardboard box that contains other pieces of cardboard so that you can build your own toys that probably won’t last three months unharmed in your house. It almost sounds like a scam, right?In reality, those little cardboard toys are an incredible feat of engineering. Setting aside how intricate the cardboard constructions themselves are, the software behind them uses technology built into the Switch and its controllers on a level that no Switch game has come close to so far. This kit is made for builders, DIYers, and anyone who’s ever been curious how stuff works.
Building the Toy-Cons Is a Fun, if Tedious Project
The Variety Kit, which is the model I’m reviewing, comes with five projects: an RC “car,” a fishing rod, a house, a motorbike, and a piano. Each one of them—with the exception of the RC car—is deceptively complex. On the Make page of the Labo app, you can see an estimate of how much time it will take to put together each project. On the low end, Nintendo expects it will take about 90-150 minutes for the fishing rod or motorbike. On the high end? The piano is estimated to take 150-210 minutes. I’ll save you the math: that’s anywhere from two and a half to three and a half hours.
This isn’t an exaggeration, either. I set aside most of a Saturday to put together the house and piano, estimated to take anywhere from four and a half to six and a half hours total. Savvy Switch owners might notice that this is longer than the three-to-six hour battery life (depending on the game) that Nintendo estimates you can get from the Switch. Indeed, I had to charge the console multiple times while building both projects, before finally giving up, laying the console flat, and plugging it into the wall. You can use the dock and control the instructions with your Joy-Cons, if you’d rather not deal with the battery, if you have a work space near your TV. To its credit, the game suggests you take breaks every once in a while, which would be a good time to stretch your legs and charge your console. The upside is, you’re getting a lot to do for your money.
While you’re building, the game shows you step-by-step 3D instructions. You can rotate the camera around the models to get a better look from any angle, and you can even fast forward or rewind at any point. If you miss a step or want to get a better look from another angle, you can just slide the video backwards. By grabbing and stretching the navigation buttons, you can speed the instructions up to hurry along.
The video instructions are simple enough to follow, but if you bought the Labo kit for kids, we’d recommend building the projects together and helping them. Many of the folds are very precise and adding things like reflective stickers can cause problems later on if they’re not put in the right place or haphazardly applied.
Discovering How the Toys Work Is a Delight
The first project I built was the house (because my partner was too excited to wait for me on the RC car and fishing pole projects). After a couple hours of construction, I was left with a house that the Switch console fit in, with the right Joy-Con sitting in the chimney. It had three square holes, two on either side, and one on the bottom. Finally, I had three accessory bits: one button, one knob, and one crank.
Setting aside how cool it is that Nintendo designed a button, knob, and crank out of cardboard—it’s better to experience how they work as you build them—I was curious what they did. The software drops you into the game without much explanation. All you see on the screen is a fluffy…
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