Review: iMP Tech Mini Arcade Pro

The Nintendo Switch family of consoles is great at a lot of things, but you know what they’re not any good at? Being an arcade cabinet from the 1980s. OK, it’s probably a highly specific market lamenting that one oversight, but if you find yourself in that niche, then UK-based peripheral maker iMP Tech might have just the thing for you.

The Mini Arcade Pro is an arcade cabinet shell compatible with the original Switch, the Switch OLED, and the Switch 2. It’s built around an eight-button base unit with a retro-style eight-way joystick, emulating the look and feel of classic rigs, with your console slotting in to serve as the screen. It also packs in a few touches you wouldn’t find in the arcade, like a mappable Turbo feature.

Given that the Switch is home to a host of classic arcade-style games—thanks to titles included in the Nintendo Switch Online libraries for NES, SNES, and Genesis/Mega Drive, and through various retro releases such as Namco Museum over the years—this should make for a gadget perfect for delivering some (slightly gimmicky) throwback fun. Sadly, it’s marred by production and design issues, making it hard to recommend.

Photograph: Matt Kamen

Building Simulator

The Mini Arcade Pro comes flat-packed in seven pieces, though you’ll only use six to put it together—there’s a tray each for the original Switch models and the Switch 2. Each of those is hinged, allowing you to insert the core tablet of either console, and then seals magnetically to hold it safely in place. It's all fairly intuitive to snap together. A rear panel adds stability and 12 storage slots for Switch game cards, then the console tray slides into place, docking onto a male USB connector. A marquee strip then snaps onto the top, holding everything together. The arcade base draws power from the console, but a through-port underneath allows you to plug a USB-C charger.

The unit pairs with the console as a controller, which involves a little bit of menu diving and telling your Switch to regard it as a Pro Controller in wired communication mode. If you usually use a Pro Controller wirelessly, you’ll need to swap this setting each time. For anyone using a Switch 2, the cabinet can use the console’s wake function and has a C button to activate GameChat—connecting a camera might be a bit tricky given the setup, but the Switch 2’s built-in microphone suffices for voice chat.

Photograph: Matt Kamen

Once it’s all assembled, the cabinet weighs 891 grams when using the Switch 2 shell and an even sturdier 1,200 grams when the Switch 2 tablet is inserted. With four large, rubber feet, it feels nice and stable on most surfaces—you’d have to be engaging in some vigorous joystick wiggling to send it flying.

There is a hitch using this cabinet with the Switch 2: The recent 21.0.0 system update means that Mini Arcade Pro units with batch number 0925 need a firmware update to work properly. It’s not only iMP Tech that’s been caught out by this—many third-party peripherals seem to be having issues as a result—but the fix requires a cable with a female USB-C port to apply the update. iMP says it will provide an appropriate cable to customers who need one, on proof of purchase. You’ll also need a Windows PC environment to run the updater, as it’s an .exe file.

Unfortunately, after you’ve done all that construction and updating, the Mini Arcade Pro presents one major problem: You have to look at it.

Design Crimes

There are two ways to approach the Mini Arcade Pro’s design ethos: its physical design and its graphic design. The former is pretty good! The finished unit is nicely evocative of the actual arcade cabinets of the 1980s and ’90s or more recent bar-top arcade mini cabs like the Evercade Alpha. Sure, building it around the Switch’s widescreen display means digressing from the boxy 4:3 displays that many originals had, and the shrunken-down structure is a wholesale departure, but it still sits on your desk like a sense memory given form. The swooping arcs and angles of the ersatz rig hit all the right notes, while the eight-button layout and cherry-red handle of the joystick very much look the part.

Photograph: Matt Kamen

The graphic design, though … hooboy. This is, bluntly, absolutely atrocious on multiple levels. The headline marquee juxtaposes two terrible fonts—a sort of jaunty Comic Sans on acid for “MINI ARCADE” and a blocky, italicized, faux-pixelated “PRO”—into an overly colorful mess that feels juvenile and childish rather than retro. The side panels feature a quartet of layered arrows extending along the height and depth of the unit, an idea that could have a bit of simplistic ’80s charm to it, but it’s applied in slapdash fashion, with different widths to each arrow that make it look like badly pasted clip art. While the arrow's color order is consistent with the cabinet’s face buttons—red, yellow, green, blue—that feels more like a happy accident than a deliberate choice. You’ve seen “graphic design is my passion” memes that actually have a better grasp of design than this.

Worst of all is that the cabinet is practically dripping in AI slop imagery. Each side panel has a hallucination of nightmarish faces—I think they’re faces—and distended hands; jagged teeth and what looks like bunched-up intestines, all grasping at impossibly shaped gaming controllers and exploding out of some sort of apocalyptic meat grinder. Elsewhere, the main control panel and that already-blighted marquee have more malformed controllers, flying out of yet more explosions. Even if these elements had been applied with intent and drawn by an actual human—one who knew what a controller looks like or realized that internal organs don’t typically leave the body for a gaming session—the aesthetic is far too busy, leaving this looking like a complete mess.

Photograph: Matt Kamen

I reached out to iMP to ask about its clear use of AI imagery for the Mini Arcade Pro. In response, a representative said: “Due to time constraints, the production team in China relied on various imagery for use on the outer marquee to hit production timelines; however, that is now under consultation and is due to be revised as part of a running change.”

A potential sliver of good news for future buyers, then. There’s no word, however, on when a revised design may enter production, what that design may be, or if it would be more AI slop.

No Coins Required

If you can look past the dreadful aesthetics, or fancy redecorating it yourself (hey, it’s an art project, too!), then the Mini Arcade Pro is at least decent fun to use.

The joystick feels especially delightful—nicely responsive and satisfyingly clicky as it moves around. Its metal shaft feels resilient, too. With only the one stick on the cabinet, it has to pull triple duty, though, with a hard toggle on the top right of the panel emulating the Switch’s left thumbstick, D-pad, or right thumbstick. If you’re sticking to arcade classics, you won’t find much need to swap out of D-pad mode.

Photograph: Matt Kamen

There is what looks like another maddening design fail, with the Switch’s left shoulder buttons, L and ZL, positioned on the right of the Mini Arcade Pro’s eight-button layout, with the right-hand R and ZR buttons to their left. However, this is actually a trick borrowed from other console arcade sticks, and it works surprisingly well for 2D fighters such as Ultra Street Fighter II. Capcom’s classic series builds combos from light, medium, and heavy punches and kicks, which is best suited to a six-button layout. Played on a “regular” controller, those inputs usually extend from the four face buttons to the right-hand shoulder buttons. Here, the B, A, and ZR buttons, and the Y, X, and R buttons line up in rows, so the game plays just like it would on an actual cabinet. It’s neat.

However, I wouldn’t use the Mini Arcade Pro to play fighters competitively, even for low-stakes online play. While the joystick feels great, the rest of the inputs feel far from tournament grade. I occasionally noticed overly sensitive “twitchy” controls, where pressing a button once—to select a game in a compendium title, for instance—would result in multiple inputs, even without that aforementioned Turbo feature activated. It’s not a consistent problem, but annoying when it happens.

Photograph: Matt Kamen

As the Mini Arcade Pro is only designed for one player, it feels better suited to arcade puzzlers, shooters, and side-scrolling beat-’em-ups anyway. The Golden Axe games in Sega Genesis/Mega Drive Collection, the entire roster of Capcom Beat-’Em-Up Bundle, and Namco Museum’s Splatterhouse all fared well, as did the classics Pac-Man and Galaga. Shooters in particular are where that Turbo feature comes in handy—hold down the Turbo button, then the input you want to apply the feature to, and blast away to your heart’s content. Repeat the process to turn the feature off.

That’s probably not enough to salvage this for most players. Unless you’re using your Switch or Switch 2 to near-exclusively play old-school games—or at least old-school-style games, like Streets of Rage 4 or Terminator 2D: No Fate—then this has limited appeal. Coupled with the hoops you need to jump through to update it for Switch 2 usage and the abysmal imagery slopped all over the thing, the Mini Arcade Pro isn’t so much retro as it's better left in the past.