Nintendo Switch Sports Resort revives the glory days of Wii Sports

Nintendo has made a niche for itself delivering strong, motion-based sports simulator games. This legacy began with the Nintendo Wii in iconic 2000s games Wii Sports and Wii Sports Resort, and continues through the equally excellent Nintendo Switch Sports Resort.

These sorts of games feel very needed right now. While it’s easy to dismiss them as light-hearted party games, the Nintendo sports games are very good for a number of reasons. Beyond being very fun to play with friends, they also allow for active play and exercise.

These titles have been proven to help seniors with their motion and cognitive function, helping them to stay active and social. For younger folks, keeping active is still important and Nintendo Switch Sports Resort provides plenty of excuses to get moving.

Its smorgasbord of fun and frenetic mini-games encourages you to stay on your feet and take part in a range of incremental physical challenges, with some funnier games thrown in for good measure. For a relaxing afternoon or just a chance to get on your feet, this game brims with energy.

Mini-games to keep you flying through Nintendo Switch Sports Resort

Nintendo Switch Sports Resort features 12 mini-games to keep you going: tennis, bowling, archery, boxing, volleyball, table tennis, basketball, golf, thumb wrestling, prop plane (flying), skateboarding and power cruising. While some share similarities (table tennis and tennis), they’re all fairly standalone and diverse in their movement and challenges.

Thumb wrestling requires you to hold your Joy-Cons vertically and wrestle your opponent until you trap them with a big, super-charged thumb. Golf requires you to point your Joy-Con down, then swing as you would a real-life golf club (with wonderful emulation of the act). Archery asks you to position your Joy-Cons and physically pull them back as you would a real bow and arrow.

There’s also volleyball (my least favourite of the sports for its finickiness) which requires you to hold out your hands and ‘bounce’ volleyballs around; bowling, which asks you to pull off swings with a flourish; and boxing, which lets you air box.

Each sport is different enough to feel like its own fresh challenge, with some also having multiple difficulties and scenarios to conquer.

Nintendo has an array of sports franchises beyond its self-named simulator games. There’s Mario Tennis and Mario Golf, to name just two. Nintendo Switch Sports Resort feels a lot like all of these games in one, with each sport getting its own robust set of challenges and progression systems to make them feel well-rounded and well worth replaying.

The golf system is a particular highlight, and it does seem to share much in common with Mario Golf. Using sharp, refined movements, you’re spending time swinging back and putting golf balls across vast and sunshine-filled greens. The controller does well to map your intended movements and tilts, and to allow you to swing wildly as you attempt to clear great stretches of landscape to sink your next ball.

Bowling operates similarly, with a slightly different movement system. It’s so much fun perfecting your flourishes and figuring out how to spin your way to a strike or spare. Another novel twist in this mode is you can play regular bowling or hundred-pin bowling, where you must knock down a hundred smaller pins using sharp eyes and clever tactics.

Boxing is a different kind of joy, as you work to dodge, weave and punch your way through various tough opponents in the style of Punch-Out!!

Perhaps the deepest joy to be found here, beyond perfecting your various swings, is the game’s new ‘open world’ modes, found in the prop plane, skateboarding and power cruising mini-games. While you can play these competitively, in races and in photo-collecting modes, you can also switch off all challenges to simply explore the iconic Wuhu Island at your own pace.

Exploring a wide open world

Prop Plane is a mini-game with three entirely separate modes.

The first lets you explore Wuhu Island and collect various photographs along the way, with a five-minute timer forcing you to make choices about where you roam. In this mode, you can also spend time popping balloons to complete various hidden challenges.

The second lets you play along with friends, competing to collect the most balloons while also ‘eating’ the balloons of other players, a bit like in the mobile game Snake.

The third mode, and the most relaxing, is the open world mode that’s free of any challenge. This one lets you manoeuvre your plane through Wuhu Island, exploring to the furthest parts of the map to discover everything it has to offer – regions for golfing, hotels, secret islands, volcanoes, and beyond. While you don’t really achieve anything in this mode, it’s a fun little offering and one that gives a bit more depth to the activities of the game.

As an added bonus, you can also explore widely by sea (power cruising) and by land (skateboarding), giving you a well-rounded glimpse of Wuhu Island.

While it would’ve been nice to have more collectables in this part of the game, perhaps allowing players to collect photos in these modes too, it’s a nice, relaxing add-on. Being able to discover new sights at your own leisure is lovely.

Fighting with your friends

When you’re not going for leisurely flights on island time, Nintendo Switch Sports Resort can also become a highly-competitive experience. The choice is yours. Either spend time solo enjoying breezy fun and occasionally testing your skills (archery requires particular precision), or head to online modes to test yourself against friends or others online.

Playing through one online session pre-launch, everything was really smooth and worked well alongside GameChat features. You can play online easily or set up a custom lobby with friends, where one player hosts and decides which games to play.

Not all of them are fully compatible online, but most are or have an alternative game mode for multiplayer use. Prop plane’s main mode, for example, can’t be explored freely – but there is a balloon-collecting game that lets you experience it with friends.

Activities like thumb wrestling and bowling translate well, with matches easily set up to test your strength and fortitude. I had the most fun with archery in multiplayer mode, if only to see just how badly I was whiffing it against my crew.

In the later stages of this mode, you do get moving targets, segmented boards and high wind speed, so you really have to pay attention to perfect your skills – if you want to, that is. Nintendo Switch Sports Resort is also perfectly rewarding as a breezy and carefree game if you want to ignore its more competitive aspects.

A rewards system lends some impetus

Whether you’ve got competition or your own personal enjoyment to motivate you, Nintendo Switch Sports Resort is also moreish and encouraging by design, with a rewards system pushing you along as well.

I’m not so enamoured that some of the game’s rewards are limited time, encouraging you to push ahead and complete challenges on a set deadline, but I can’t deny the gacha-like system is brain tickling and it’s good fun to pull the rewards you want, like a cool new dress or a jellyfish costume.

It should be noted this is not a micro-transaction system and it’s only by your own hard work that you’ll unlock everything. The system simply exists as a progress bar for your play, allowing additional rewards as you hit achievements or unlock daily play milestones.

Even without this, Nintendo Switch Sports Resort is a wonderful, rewarding time. With its suite of well-rounded mini-games, designed to be simple, distilled forms of each featured sport, there’s lots to explore and a very neat array of unlockables to keep you swinging, smashing, sliding and gliding through Wuhu Island.

A Nintendo Switch 2 code for Nintendo Switch Sports Resort was provided to ScreenHub for the purposes of this review.

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