Windjammers 2 Switch Review: Jamscendence

User Rating: 7
Windjammers 2 PC Review

I worry sometimes that I am beyond having fun. I read books about grief and watch news about the dissolution of society and listen to songs about regret. I reflect on the past and fear the future more than I exist in the present. I mope, still; I feel like I should have grown out of moping at some point in the last thirty years. Yet here I am, looking out of a window at the receding winter, feeling the absence of something vital that I can’t accurately put in words.

But then I boot up Windjammers 2 and am transported against my will to a world of endearing midi rock and goofy animation and an overwhelming sense of escapist fun. Windjammers 2 is the jeep full of beach-bound hardbodies to my chubby, brooding, long-sleeved wallflower. Its mechanics, while taught in the most obtuse and non-interactive way possible, are more robust than they initially appear. It doesn’t last, but it’s fun while it does. This is our Windjammers 2 review for Nintendo Switch.

I didn’t believe in Windjammers 2. Or, more accurately, I didn’t want to believe. I refused to buy in, to release myself to its candy-colored bonehead fun. I wanted to wallow in my little island of late-stage pandemic isolation, staring out the window at February’s gunmetal ice and thinking dismal winter thoughts.

Windjammers 1

This, except the snow looks like someone sprayed shit all over it, and back hair is poking out of the loose-knit of the sweater.

The title screen offended me. I was taken aback by the sheer tonal dissonance it presented to my mindset. This is a desperate time, I thought to myself, not a time for FLYING DISC GAME in pink and white and a disembodied voice spitting out “WINDJAMMERS 2” in such a hurried way that it feels like the voice actor ran up to the microphone from some sort of beach party, yelled her line, then ran right back, probably holding a red cup. It’s just not that time.

It was with this mindset that I found myself at a crossroads: would I sit back in my pissy, sad, late-winter cloud and pick this game apart, or would I become what the game wanted me to be: Molly Ringwald in The Breakfast Club, doing that ’80s dance in the stairs after smoking Bender’s pot? Life is peppered with these little decisions.

I decided to kick my cranky brain in the dick and become Molly, and I’m glad that I did. Windjammers 2, in the right mindset, is a ton of fun (for 45 minutes).

Windjammers 2 - 2

What no one does after smoking a joint.

If you are unfamiliar with the concept of Windjammers (as I was), then imagine Super Dodgeball had a style baby with the boombox scene in Teen Witch, and, once the baby came out, they dunked it in the X-treme River Styx. Oh, also they throw discs instead of dodgeballs. And even Teen Witch has no time for characters named Hurricane Max and Gary Scott. But I digress.

Having surrendered my analytical mind to Windjammers, I picked S. Delys (whose name, I later found out, was actually Sophie De Lys, killing the M. Bison mood (unless I find out, now, that the M. stands for Maurice or something, in which case he and Mrs. De Lys have more in common than I could have possibly imagined)), she mumbled “Allez!” in compressed French, and off we went into my first arcade match. I figured there would be a tutorial round to get me up to speed, like a “press this button to throw, press this button to slide” kind of thing. Instead, I hopped into Jeff Kanew’s fever dream of a beach party and got my ass handed to me immediately by the aforementioned Hurricane Max, the least charitable interpretation of a Canadian I’ve ever seen. I don’t think I ever pushed the same button twice as I fumbled around trying to figure out what combination of what did what. Do I push ZR, ever? What does the gauge at the bottom of the screen mean? Who was in charge of the gut jiggle animation on Hurricane Max? All unanswered as I floundered against the shoals of learning how to play with zero guidance.

Windjammers 2 is not a robust game, and it is aware of this fact. Everything aims you rocket-like toward playing a round of disc tennis as quickly as possible, no questions asked. There is an online mode for disc tennis, a local mode for disc tennis, and an arcade mode where you play disc tennis against AI opponents, all of whom I relentlessly mocked for their inability to defend against my onslaught (“EASY MODE’S NOT SUPPOSED TO BE THIS EASY, FUCKO!” I would scream at my screen after my inevitable victory). The game is in such a rush for you to start playing that, after you choose a character in arcade mode, the screen fades before the words “Championship” can finish scrolling across. It’s like playing Dungeons and Dragons with an unprepared DM: no matter what you do, everything leads to one possible outcome.

This insubstantiality is only an issue when it comes to the tutorial or lack thereof. You have two options for learning how to play: watch this video (please; it’s so good) or click on the in-game “How to Play” option. The latter option will lead you to a series of slides that purportedly teach you how to play, but all they did for me is muddy the waters with a bunch of directions isolated from actual gameplay. Seriously, this section is easily the worst part of this game.

Windjammers 2 - 3

The worst part of a game that features the blonde dipshit on the right as a character choice. Gag on a bag, Hurricane Max.

If you’re going to make a tutorial, at least make us play through a match where we’re forced to use all of the different moves. As it stands, my 38-year-old brain with a wife and a career and a child and a house payment had no time for that bullshit. I started to doubt my working memory when, three matches in, I still couldn’t remember how to slide, to say nothing of the somewhat janked timing of perfect returns.

I blamed the game for its obtuseness and poor design. I wrote rage notes about the abject stupidity of not including a playable tutorial, which, when your moveset stretches into the double digits (most of which involve combinations of buttons and/or swerves of the joystick and are context-sensitive depending on whether you’re on offense or defense), seems like an absolute necessity.

But I was not there to overanalyze. I was there to jam the wind, and so jam I did. Something became apparent to me as I played: the less I thought, the more I jammed. The less I attempted to deconstruct or form narratives or couch the game in the current zeitgeist of gaming or all those other reviewer-type things, the more I enjoyed myself. And as I sat there, having some dumb fun, I was transported back to the days of dim arcades and Mortal Kombat and Cruis’n USA and The Simpsons and the old Golden Axe machine in the back, the days before adulthood and abstract thought. I just played, like a kid with a toy, and it was awesome.

It may be shlock, but Windjammers 2 is fun shlock. It has a thong-sandaled foot planted firmly in the radical past (prepare for jiggle animations and buxom-high-waisted-one-piece-bathing-suited line judges) and its other foot…well, I’m still trying to decide where that other foot lies. Something elevates the action in this game into the realm of pure medical-grade fun. Something pushes it beyond its painfully obvious limitations. It doesn’t last forever, but what does? If you want a night of goofy good times, then grab a buddy or a spouse or a hostage and have yourself a ball.

Windjammers 2 - 5

Not pictured: Sophie De Lys’s police baton. I’m serious.

Compare to: Disc Jam (which is, itself, plagiarizes the gameplay of the original Windjammers), Super Dodgeball, Mario Tennis

This review was completed with a Switch code provided by PR.

Summary
Windjammers 2 is the jeep full of beach-bound hardbodies to my chubby, brooding, long-sleeved wallflower. Its mechanics, while taught in the most obtuse and uninteractive way possible, are more robust than they initially appear. It doesn't last, but it's fun while it does.
Good
  • Incessantly bright and upbeat, from the music to the art
  • Mechanics are a party once you get used to them
  • Brings you back to the good old days of playful stereotyping
Bad
  • Fun is short-lived
  • If you have no nostalgia for the '90s, this will be a total strikeout for you
  • Hurricane Max is an irredeemably bad character and his existence makes my life worse
7
Good

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