Civilization VI on Nintendo Switch seemed like the perfect handheld strategy game

Civilization VI was the fourth game I bought for my Nintendo Switch Lite, and I picked it up during Covid.

I'd already sunk hundreds of hours into Age of Empires, so the idea of carrying a full civilization-building game around in my hands sounded almost too good. Build a city on the couch. Take a few turns in bed. Play while waiting for something. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, the mouse was gone.

I gave Civilization VI a few hours before I quit. And that surprised me because I actually liked the game. The problem was getting around the game.

Civilization VI throws an absurd amount of information at you. Cities, units, technology trees, diplomacy, governors, production queues, map controls, little icons everywhere. On PC, I can point at something with a mouse, click it, move somewhere else, and keep going.

On the Nintendo Switch, I'm doing all of that with buttons and analog sticks.

That sounds like a small difference until you're 100 turns into a game and you've spent half your evening fighting the interface instead of fighting the Romans.

The Nintendo Switch controls are the real problem

The Nintendo Switch version of Civilization VI does a surprisingly good job of adapting a complicated PC strategy game to a controller. There are shortcuts, menus and touchscreen controls, and I wouldn't call the port unplayable.

But "playable" isn't the same thing as "comfortable."

Selecting units can become fiddly when several are stacked together. Panning around the map with the analog stick doesn't have the same precision as moving a mouse. Assigning Governors and working through the game's many menus can take more effort than it should.

And then there's the touchscreen.

In handheld mode on the Nintendo Switch, you can use it, which helps. But that creates another weird situation: the best way to interact with a game designed around a mouse is to poke your Nintendo Switch screen like you're operating a very expensive Excel spreadsheet.

I wanted to play Civilization VI as a handheld strategy game. Instead, I kept thinking about how much easier the same turn would be with a mouse.

The Nintendo Switch hardware starts showing its limits later on

The controls were enough to push me away, but the Nintendo Switch hardware doesn't exactly make the late game more attractive.

Civilization VI has a lot of stuff to calculate. As the map fills up, more civilizations are moving units, managing cities and making decisions. On larger maps, late-game turns on the Nintendo Switch can take noticeably longer, especially once you get deep into the game.

That's the worst possible place for a strategy game to slow down.

You're already spending more time making decisions because your empire has become complicated. Then you have to wait for everyone else to finish their turn.

And there are reports from Nintendo Switch players of crashes during longer games, particularly in the later stages. Losing progress in a strategy game after you've spent hours building an empire is a special kind of pain.

You know that feeling when you finally get your civilization exactly where you want it?

Yeah. Save your game.

Civilization VI taught me what this list is actually about

This is where I started thinking differently about Nintendo Switch games.

Civilization VI isn't a bad game. Far from it. The Nintendo Switch version isn't even some completely broken port that should never have existed.

It's just a game where the things I liked about playing Civilization VI on PC became the things I disliked about playing it on Nintendo Switch.

The portability sounded perfect. The controls weren't.

And that distinction matters for this whole list.

Some games arrive on the Nintendo Switch with hardware compromises that are impossible to ignore. Some get ports that simply don't work very well. Others are technically fine but feel completely wrong when you replace a mouse and keyboard with a pair of Joy-Cons.

Civilization VI falls into more than one of those buckets.

I wanted to build an empire. I didn't want to spend my evening negotiating with the cursor.

FAQ

How do I know when a game isn't suitable for Nintendo Switch controls?

Honestly, sometimes you can tell before buying it.

That was my mistake with Civilization VI. I should have looked at the game and thought about how many menus, buttons, tiny icons and precise selections I was going to deal with on a Nintendo Switch Lite. I didn't. I saw "Civilization on a handheld" and thought, that's awesome.

Then I spent hours trying to control it.

Reddit is a good place to check before buying. Search for the game together with words like "Nintendo Switch controls," "Switch port," or "handheld." You'll usually find people talking about the exact things that bother them after they've already spent the money.

But your own common sense is probably the best filter.

If a game has a huge amount of information on screen, requires constant cursor movement, or was clearly designed around a mouse and keyboard, stop for a second and ask yourself how that is going to feel with a controller.

Strategy games deserve extra attention here, but don't automatically rule them out. The question is how much precision and menu navigation the game demands. Into the Breach is a good example of a strategy game that is great to play on the Nintendo Switch. I'll share more about that game later.

How do I know if a game is a good fit for Nintendo Switch controls?

The good news is that most games are perfectly fine on the Nintendo Switch.

If you're looking at a Metroidvania, a platformer, a party game, a co-op game, or a game built specifically for Nintendo hardware, you're usually on much safer ground. Nintendo's own first-party games are an obvious place to start because their controls are designed around the hardware from day one.

I also pay attention to the kind of interaction the game expects from me.

If I'm mostly moving a character, jumping, fighting, aiming, racing or exploring, a controller makes perfect sense. If I'm constantly selecting tiny boxes, dragging things around a map and opening five different menus to change one setting, that's when I start getting suspicious.

The easiest test is to ask what the game was designed around

Before buying a game for the Nintendo Switch, I ask myself one simple question:

What input method does this game really want?

If the answer is "a controller," the Nintendo Switch is probably a good home for it.

If the answer is "a mouse," I take a closer look at the Nintendo Switch version before spending my money.

And if the answer is "a ridiculously powerful PC with 14 buttons, a mouse, a keyboard and probably a second monitor," well... maybe that one can stay on Steam.