I wake up, my fist twisted into the shape of a Joy-Con 2, with a sharp pain in my right shoulder following a night of intense table tennis. There must be a new Nintendo Sports game.
Like everyone else in the world, I poured days in Wii Sports in 2006 and spent an ungodly amount of time soaring through the skies of Wuhu Island in its successor, Wii Sports Resort. Perhaps a little less like everyone else, I also took things way too seriously in the forgotten Wii Sports Club on Wii U, and Nintendo Switch Sports is one of my most played games on the titular hardware.
All that to say, my body was ready for the Nintendo Switch Sports Resort. Its predecessor launched in a far from game-ready state in 2022, but it has become a much more attractive package in future updates. The big question was: Would Switch Sports Resort be just as slow off the starting line, or would it come out of the gate swinging? As the stiff right shoulder I mentioned can attest, it is indeed the latter.
Nintendo Switch Sports Resort is everything Switch Sports should have been at launch and more. With a lineup of 12 sports, different game modes, vastly improved character customization, and a surprising amount of single-player content, this sequel more than lives up to its Resort namesake. It may not be revolutionary at all, but it’s pretty much everything I would want from the series.
Let’s start with these sports – they are the main event, after all. Switch Sports Resort features five games compared to the previous entry (tennis, volleyball, bowling, basketball, and golf), all of which play essentially the same as before.
Volleyball still seems a little slow, bowling and golf still rule the roost, and this time around you have three different tennis courts to choose from. Innovative. The remaining seven sports will be familiar to those who have played the other entries in the series, but they are given new life on Switch 2.
Boxing is perhaps the least engaging of the new bunch, with the Joy-Con 2’s motion controls sometimes faltering under the combination of ducks, hooks and jabs, but table tennis really picks up the slack on the movement front and offers a great feeling of ball control. how you return your photos.
Archery has great tactility in its “back and shoot” control system, and thumb wrestling is perhaps the biggest surprise of the lot, proving an instant party hit with its intuitive controls and surprisingly deep tactical potential. Who knew I would be so obsessed with the strategy of developing a really big thumb easily pin my opponents?
This makes a good choice overall, although I would have liked to see a little more variety in the exhibition. Tennis, volleyball, and table tennis are all good in their own right, but the gameplay is kind of the same in the grand scheme of things: where’s Wii Sports Baseball or the OG Resort’s Disc Golf when you need it?
The big win for me lies in the three recreational sports (Power Cruising, Prop Plane, and Skateboarding), each offering the most inventive controls and gameplay.
In Power Cruising (a legally distinct way of saying “you’re driving a jet ski”), you hold your Joy-Con horizontally in front of you, rev the engine while rotating backward, and lean left and right to steer. Prop Plane lets you hold the controller like a toy plane, rotating and tilting it to control its trajectory. Skateboarding is aimed at the 99% of Switch 2 owners who haven’t played Drag x Drive, and sees you slide across a surface in mouse mode to mimic pushing the board, lifting and flicking the controller to perform tricks.
They all feel unapologetically “Nintendo” in practice, while also offering wonderful solo potential between party sessions. Wuhu Island is full of collectibles and challenges, and each of the three leisure sports offers a Guided Tour mode, in which you have five minutes to explore your surroundings and collect as much as possible.
Although the timer can feel a bit restrictive at times (there is a Free Roam mode without a timer, although no collectibles are available there), I had a great time exploring the island’s best photo spots and doing slaloms to take a break from the more intense sporting challenges.
And Resort doesn’t shy away from this challenge either. Adding to the game’s single-player sequel is the new Island Crown mode, in which you must climb the Wuhu ranks to challenge the island champion in each sport. The confrontations start off very simple (frankly, I felt bad for my first opponent in Boxing), but they quickly lead to real rivalries. This time I really loved table tennis and the island champion gave me such a hard time that I ended up having to change my shirt for something a little less sweaty.
Each sport also comes with its own set of achievements to unlock as you play. These can be checked off in single or multiplayer, but they’re another reason to come back for more.
As someone who often struggles to find willing Switch Sports partners in the real world, I appreciated the bonus content in single-player, but of course the game really sings in multiplayer. I invited a few friends over for a quick look at Wuhu’s activities, and we quickly fell back into the same laughs we all had in the mid-2000s with our freshly unboxed Wiis (mostly at the expense of my very excessive, but very effective, post-bowl leg flick).
The old classics like bowling and tennis are always a hit, of course, but we also had an unexpectedly good time with archery, tracking down the courses’ secret targets and gradually becoming more and more excited as we got closer to them.
Most sports now also have a different game mode, so you can change the standard rules for section-specific archery, cup-focused table tennis, timing-focused volleyball and much more. I particularly like Prop Plane’s dogfight-style Ball Battle mode, even if it seems like a slightly odd addition.
Some multiplayer restrictions are still in place – you still can’t play local co-op in Table Top mode, which reduces the portable party promise somewhat – and you’ll need to get your hands on some bonus Joy-Con 2s if you want to play mouse mode-specific skateboarding with two or more friends, but overall it’s still a damn good time.
This carries over to online gaming as well. In typical Nintendo form, there are a few bumps in the road to stopping an online competition. completely smoothly (weird wait times between bowling rounds, being sent back to the lobby when changing sports), but these are very minor inconveniences while the rest is everything you’d want it to be.
The vastly improved customization options are a real reason to to want to continue playing too. While all the activity of purchasing clothing and accessories was reserved for online play in its predecessor, Resort makes things much more open, granting you points for completing any game, which can then be spent in the in-game store. The store is refreshed every week, with different collections for each user, consisting of clothing, accessories, name tag options and sports equipment that you can choose from at random.
It would also have been nice to back off the random element a bit – if I really want to get a new hat, let me just buy one – but it’s a much better setup than the last game. You can also earn items by completing sporting feats or leveling up in Island Crown, so you’re never far from expanding your wardrobe.
Gn tech
