At the height of my Rocket League obsession, I tried desperately to get the game working on my Vita through Remote Play. It semi-worked a few times, but more often than not Remote Play let me down, and this was no exception. When I was lucky enough to get the game playing on the device, it was saddled with dropped frames, artifacting, and connection issues.  Now that it’s come to Switch, I’ve finally got the portable Rocket League setup I dreamed of back then, and it’s as glorious as I had hoped.

Since the earliest days of the Switch, I’ve been thinking about the many indie games that would be a perfect fit for the platform, especially ones that have heretofore not been available to Nintendo fans. Rocket League seemed like one of the best fits for the system from a gameplay perspective. The highly-focused concepts behind the game’s play mechanics and quirky “cars playing soccer” premise seem so Nintendo to me. And of course the Mario Kart crossover potential is obvious, as is the sheer volume of Nintendo hats and designs that could be added to the impressive roster of pop culture and gaming references they already have in there.

In the back of my mind, though, I was skeptical Rocket League would ever come to the system. Somehow it felt like the kind of game that was considered too “cool” to bother with Nintendo. I was pleasantly surprised when they announced the Switch port of the game at E3, and I’ve enjoyed hearing about how both Nintendo and the game’s developer, Psyonix, approached the project.

It’s refreshing to hear about Nintendo reaching out to these kinds of developers and being surprisingly accommodating to their requests for things as arguably unlikely as cross-platform play. And it’s heartening for third parties like Psyonix to see the potential in putting effort toward a worthy port for Nintendo’s slightly less powerful but eminently appealing new system. After the third-party struggles of Wii U, it’s really nice to see games that are a good fit for this budding platform actually show up in a timely fashion and to see that the developers understand the benefit of taking time to optimize a game for it.

Rocket League on Switch jettisons many of the elaborate graphical flourishes that gussy up other versions of the game, but it looks good enough and delivers solid 60-frames-per-second gameplay. And that’s just fine with me, because the gameplay of Rocket League is so pure, unique, and rewarding.

I’ve always said that it reminds me, more so than than any other game, of playing a real-life sport. In a so-called “real sports game” (those based on your standard football, basketball, soccer, etc.), you don’t control your player’s actions on a granular level, you typically manage the play of an entire team and use simplified controls to manipulate the actions of elite athletes as they easily perform what would be complex and difficult maneuvers in real life. For example, you can perform an elaborate crossover in NBA 2K with a button press and some basic flicks of a stick.

In Rocket League, you use some very basic inputs to control your onscreen avatar (which just so happens to be a car equipped with jet propulsion), and you must navigate the complexities of physics, the chaos of the match, the dynamics of your team, and your own limitations to achieve your goals. You’ll start out clumsily flailing about, but over time you will organically develop your own set of skills and personality of play. Everyone is on a level playing field in terms of statistical abilities, and there’s no artificial progression. Your success comes down to dexterity, strategy, your ability to mesh with your team, and luck. It can be incredibly tense, unbelievably frustrating, remarkably rewarding, ludicrously silly, and excitingly epic, but it’s always fun.

I’m glad Nintendo fans finally have the chance to check this game out, as it has the sort of gameplay purity that they are used to and can appreciate. And for me as a returning League fan, it’s breathing new life into an abandoned favorite and giving me the most fun I’ve ever had with it. With a little luck, it can find a new audience on the Switch and become another third-party highlight that encourages more developers to bring their work to the system.