Developer: Nintendo
Publisher: Nintendo
Platform: Switch 2
Tested on: Switch 2
Nintendo Switch Sports Resort – Review
If anything, Nintendo Switch Sports Resort serves as a stark reminder that we’re getting old. It wasn’t just the sore muscles and aching joints after a couple of intense workouts, but swinging a Joy-Con as if it were a baseball bat also transported us back to the original Wii Sports, which celebrates its twentieth anniversary this year. Technology has come a long way since then, and Switch Sports Resort marries the low barrier appeal of its ancestor with much truer-to-reality simulation mechanics. But is there any fun to be had here, or is this just a showcase of what the Switch 2 is technically capable of?
Story
The closest thing Switch Sports Resort has to a narrative structure is its single-player Island Crown mode, where you face off against a lineup of quirky rival athletes and champions to climb the ranks. Other than this, the game does not feature a traditional story-driven campaign. Instead, its premise centers on visiting and exploring Wuhu Island, a name that should sound familiar to fans of other sports-themed Nintendo titles, including Wii Fit, Mario Kart 7 and Pilotwings Resort. Wuhu Island is home to Spocco Resort, a holiday destination characterized by healthy leisure and sports. The resort setting adds an expansive, lively, and vibrant holiday atmosphere, even if the game comes up short when it comes to story.
Graphics
Talk about a glow-up! We’ve come a long way from the Miis from twenty years ago, with more realistically proportioned custom player avatars stepping up to the stage here. The overall aesthetic of the game is bright, colourful and cartoonish, perfectly capturing that cheerful holiday vibe. Being a first-party title, Switch Sports Resort’s technical performance is stable and solid across both docked and handheld modes on the Switch 2, with no immersion-breaking technical glitches, bugs, or loading issues that we ran into.
Sound
The sunny and cheerful music matches the overall carefree vibe that Switch Sports Resort tries to convey. While we don’t think that the tunes are as memorable as those heard in the game’s predecessors, they do help with making the game feel fun rather than competitive. Complementing the music is the island ambience, with soothing waves and crying seagulls in the background, as well as the applause and cheers of the audience reacting to your feats. The true strength of Switch Sports Resort’s sound effects is in the ones that are tied to the gameplay, especially when it comes to how noises and HD rumble come together to create tactile feedback. It’s subtle, but hearing and feeling bowstring tension, for example, really adds to the overall feeling of immersion. Voice work is present as well, but it’s mostly limited to audio prompts telling you what to do, and doesn’t add a whole lot of depth or life to the game otherwise.
Gameplay
Across its plethora of different modes, Switch Sports Resort offers no less than twelve distinct sports that you can participate in from the comfort of your living room. Supplementing the five from the original Wii Sports (baseball, boxing, bowling, golf and tennis) and one from Switch Sports (volleyball), are three new competitive sports (archery, table tennis and thumb wrestling) and three vehicle-based leisure sports (prop plane, skateboarding and power cruising). Each of these sports is simulated with intuitive motion controls, with the exception of skateboarding, which uses mouse controls instead. We won’t go into too much detail about what the new Joy-Cons are capable of, as Welcome Tour offers a much better showcase, but the difference between the Wiimote and the new controllers is night and day. Although we didn’t have our old Wii on hand to directly compare the controls, we can tell you that Switch Sports Resort does nail that “pick up and play feeling”. The motion controls feel accurate and accessible, and the various difficulty levels bring to mind the old saying “easy to learn, hard to master”.
In order to motivate you to keep exercising, Switch Sports Resort features a robust progression and avatar customisation system. By progressively getting better at a sport, earning achievements and keeping up streaks, you’ll earn in-game currency, which you can spend on new cosmetics in the in-game shop. We’ll say that we weren’t entirely on board with the shop relying on gacha mechanics and limited-time offers. At the time of writing, there was a Halloween range available, for example, but it was unclear whether or not this was something that would return next year or if you absolutely had to work towards getting it now if you wanted it. The idea is of course that you customise your avatar so that you can show off to your friends and other players, either in local multiplayer, casual online play or ranked Pro Leagues.
You’re getting quite the extensive package either way, though we should say that not every sport is equal. The five classics have already proven their merit, and some of the new additions, such as thumb wrestling, are definitely going to become game night staples. However, basketball doesn’t “flow” very well, and skateboarding’s mouse controls are more miss than hit. They defeat the purpose of the game wanting to be a simulation. The aforementioned leisure sports also lack online play. Still, the good far outweighs the bad here, and Switch Sports Resort has everything needed to become a bona fide evergreen title on the platform. At €59.99, it’s also a hell of a lot cheaper than signing up for twelve sports clubs.
Conclusion
With this latest entry in the series, Nintendo proves that the simple brilliance of Wii Sports hasn’t lost any of its luster two decades on. Switch Sports Resort takes full advantage of the technological advancements to improve on the classic sports and introduce a plethora of new ones. While not every real-life sport translates to the game equally well, the vast majority of them do. Other than the handful of niggles we mentioned, Switch Sports Resort knocks it out of the park.
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