Nex Playground Review

IGN snootily turned down an offer to review the Nex Playground around its 2023 release. And why not? It’s a casual games console from a company with no cachet in the space – a colorful little cube whose primary input method is your own body, via an ultra-wide camera lens on the front of the system.

And yet, like the Wii before it, this underestimated machine (scoffed by elite gaming media types everywhere!) managed to outsell Microsoft’s Xbox consoles over the 2025 holidays. Were we, the gaming media, wrong? So now, here I am as one of IGN’s child-having freelance writers, with a review of the little teal and yellow cube that could, the Nex Playground.

Everything about the Nex Playground, from the gentle color palette of its cutesy, 3-inch-cubed form factor to its simplicity of setup and control, is aimed squarely at parents who desperately want their screen-addled kids to move. Its popularity shouldn’t surprise: it’s simple to use, there’s almost no setup or waiting for game installs and updates, and every single game on the console forces you to get up and do something, just the way so many games did on the Wii. (I, for one, remember hearing my mom, who hadn’t played a video game since the original Super Mario Bros. on the NES, holler “Steeeeeee-RIKE!” from the other room while she played Wii Sports bowling back in 2006. This is just a logical extension of that vibe.)

Setup is a breeze. The Nex Playground comes in a neatly organized package, with numbered boxes indicating the order you should take things in. There are just four pieces: the Playground itself, an HDMI cable, a USB-C power cable (with a little magnetic puck attached to it that serves as a slap-on physical camera shutter), and a small remote. The Playground is super small and light, but the cables that come with it are very flexible and don’t shove the console around while you’re hooking it up the way a stiffer cable might.

The first-time configuration is also quick, as long as you have your Wi-Fi password handy and don’t stop to read the lengthy privacy policy – which features a TL;DR at the top assuring you that the Nex Team, the folks behind the console, won’t sell your information. Next, you have to create a Nex Playground account and push through a splash screen offering you a subscription to the company’s $89 Play Pass plan. (We’ll get to that.) Then it gives you tips, like to not wear patterned clothing, or to set it up somewhere with a play area free of furniture you could bash into. Lastly, it’ll do a little test run to make sure where you’ve put it works for it.

Once you’re through setup, there isn’t much you can configure from the settings menu found at the top of the Playground’s home screen. You won’t find HDR toggles or refresh rate and resolution options; what you get, visually, is just what you get. There are some things you can change, though: you can hide certain games or adjust the time zone, and you can decide how long you want it to idle before going to sleep, to save your precious OLED TV. You can also have it turn on or off your TV, using HDMI-CEC, when it’s powered up or goes to sleep.

Things are similarly dull for the console’s specs, which are barely worth discussing, apart from the fact that it has 16GB of RAM, which is more than the 12GB inside the Nintendo Switch 2. That doesn’t actually mean anything about their relative performance, but it’s still a funny enough stat that I made sure to write it down. Either way, what it has is enough to run its Android-based Play OS, and that’s all it needs.

Okay, okay, the Nex Playground is technically a video game console, so let’s talk about the games. Its catalog of 50-plus games ranges from a tidy collection of thoughtful but simple originals (I use the term somewhat loosely) by Nex Team, some decent third party efforts, and rejiggered versions of casual smartphone games like Fruit Ninja that we’ve all been playing for well over a decade, to the sort of sloppy, licensed shovelware that plagued the Nintendo Wii, particularly near the end of its life.

You use the Playground’s remote for setup, choosing games, and sometimes navigating in-game menus, but it’s all motion control when it comes to actual gameplay. The system’s motion tracking, which follows 18 points on your body, worked very well, even in the cramped space of my tiny apartment living room. I wish it had some form of depth detection besides its camera and onboard NPU, though, because I definitely kicked the built-in cabinet along one wall more than once because the game put an object inside of it. That wasn’t an issue most of the time, but it would’ve been nice if the games adjusted to my surroundings more (or at all).

Without a subscription, you only get five games, including Fruit Ninja. If you want more – and after you’ve paid $300 for the dang thing, you will – your only choice is to shell out for Nex Team’s $89-per-year Play Pass subscription or a $49 3-month variant thereof. Doing so nets you around 50 more games, many of which are licensed from popular children’s programming, like Gabby’s Dollhouse: A-meow-zing Moves or Unicorn Academy: Friendship Adventures.

As for whether any of this is fun, well, I’ll say up-front that if the goal is to give your kids something they might think is fun but that gets them to move around, the Nex Playground works – at first. My 8-year-old loved Fruit Ninja, and Whac-A-Mole when I first hooked the system up. Unfortunately, the novelty wore thin quickly, and within a couple of days, I was alone in my quest to see if the Nex Playground is worth your time and money. It’s a bad sign that my child lost interest so quickly, but no two kids are the same, and yours might react differently.

So, how was the actual gameplay to me, a middle-aged man? Well, I guess I’ll tell you that through a series of mini-reviews of some of the few games I enjoyed.

Homerun Heroes

There’s not much to Homerun Heroes: Starstrikers. It’s