Review: Nex Playground

Gaming is criticized for being a sedentary hobby, but it doesn’t have to be. The Nex Playground is a colorful cube-shaped console that gets you up off the couch and jumping around your living room. It reminds me of Microsoft's Kinect platform for Xbox—the Nex Playground similarly sports a motion-tracking camera that puts you in the game. You play physically with gestures and movements, without the need for a controller.

My family and I have been dancing, shooting baskets, and facing off in various party games that make you look daft for the last couple of weeks, and it has been a blast. But with limited content, questionable fitness credentials, and a subscription model, claiming a place in that crowded TV cabinet may prove tough for the Nex Playground.

The Nex Playground feels like a well-made toy. With an eye-catching green and yellow color scheme, this simple 3-inch cube is super cute. It has a soft-touch finish and a wee magnetic eye patch attached by a cord that acts as a privacy shutter for the camera lens. Setup is as simple as plugging the HDMI cable into your TV and finding a power adapter for the USB-C cable (any old phone charger will do).

Pop the Nex Playground beneath your TV and the wide-angle camera does a good job of capturing the whole room. I placed it on the shelf under my screen and used the included yellow wedge to angle the camera up. You ideally want a decent amount of space. We cleared the coffee table away to create a roughly 8-foot square and that worked fine. You get a cylindrical rechargeable remote with the Nex Playground, a bit like a Wiimote, but it’s mostly just used for navigating around the menus.

Games and activities on the Nex Playground rely on the onboard AI chip to track you. Before each game, it maps points on each player’s body to create a kind of simple skeleton and tracks your movements. Video is processed locally, and nothing is stored or sent to the cloud. The accuracy is impressive, and it feels responsive, taking less than 150 milliseconds for our actions to show on screen. That feedback makes it instantly immersive. Once it has a player locked down, it’s pretty good at tracking them, even if someone else walks in front of the camera.

Behind the scenes, the Nex Playground runs a heavily customized version of Android. Nex keeps you firmly locked into its limited library of games and apps, so there’s no Play Store, TV streaming services, or web browsing.

The Nex Playground comes with four games. Party Fowl is a selection box of mini-games for one to four players. It’s the kind of thing you’ll fire up when friends or family are visiting, and it’s sure to bring out the competitive streak in anyone. When we played there were plenty of laughs but also some arguments about fairness, as one player seemed to have an advantage in certain games.

Starri is the most polished title, and it felt a little like a live-action Rez. It's a rhythm game where you have to perform actions to hit the notes, and it features a library of licensed songs from the likes of Sia, Dua Lipa, and Imagine Dragons. Go Keeper casts you as the goalie on a soccer pitch trying to keep a torrent of balls fired by angry robots out of your net. Whack-a-Mole Deluxe was the weakest of the bunch for me, as it repetitively challenges you to bump increasingly armored moles on the noggin.

There are a further 15 games available at the time of publication, with more to come to take the total up to 20. If you want access to these and future releases, you have to spring for the Play Pass subscription for $49 quarterly or $89 annually (not to be confused with Google’s Play Pass). I found the lineup a distinctly mixed bag.

Active Arcade is another party mini-game collection, Basketball Knockout is like one of those hoop-shooting arcade machines, and Luminous feels like an aimless endless runner. Peppa Pig: Jump & Giggle is a rare license tie-in that offers young kids the chance to jump in muddy puzzles, but my kids are a bit old for that now. Miniacs is a disappointingly dull racing game that made me pine for Mario Kart. The sliding-tile puzzle game 2048 Arms was a big hit with my eldest.

Family fun is covered, and these games are all pretty active, but the Nex Playground also offers actual workouts with NexGym Fitness. I like the visual style here, with an instructor appearing to demo each exercise, and the camera tracks your form fairly well, though you have to be careful to stand in the correct setup pose before the exercise begins. But the sets on offer are too limited, many require weights, and the workouts are repetitive. There’s potential here, but much like my fitness, the app needs more work.

Nex's CEO and cofounder, David Lee, says we can expect seasonal content drops and at least another 20 titles this year. He says games will be available à la carte in early 2024 for folks who don’t want yet another subscription, but there’s no word on pricing yet. The title that jumps out at me from the “coming soon” list is Tennis, which promises you can play with your personal racket.

It's the accessibility and affordability of AI chips capable of motion tracking that made the Nex Playground possible, according to Lee. As these chips roll into TVs, set-top boxes, and streaming devices, all you need to enable games like this is a camera. Nex is already offering some of its games on Sky Live, and they will likely pop up on smart TVs with cameras that run Android TV soon.

As fun as the Nex Playground is, I’d sooner buy the games for an existing device than spring for another console that needs a spot on the media console. Add the subscription cost and it feels expensive for what you get. You are perilously close to what you’d pay for an Xbox Series S or Nintendo Switch, but both of those consoles are far more versatile. If you’re keen on this kind of gaming, you could also look at dusting off your Nintendo Wii or buying an Xbox Kinect.

The technology for motion tracking has advanced, and it's nice to be able to play games without a wearable, a Wii-mote, or some other controller. But the Nex Playground is so limited that it’s going to be a tough sell for most folks. With games based around moving or exercising in virtual reality now, the simple graphics of the Nex feel like a throwback.

Sure, it’s fun for the first couple of weeks and worth firing up when you have guests over, but will it keep you coming back for more? The local multiplayer is where it shines, and it's a nice way to get the family playing together, but I don’t feel much pull to play it on my own. Ultimately, the Nex Playground is accessible, sociable, and active, but with such a shallow pool of content, I can see it gathering dust when the novelty wears off.