Nintendo Switch Sports Resort review

I really did not like the original Nintendo Switch Sports. I found most of the sports dull, the Sportsmates were cute but lacked a little something, the gacha system was tedious, the motion controls often felt inaccurate, there were no button controls for portable play, and for some reason there were essentially three different types of tennis. On the surface, you’d think Nintendo Switch Sports Resort would be repeating all of those mistakes. The gacha system is unchanged, there’s still three different sports focused on hitting a ball over a net, and the Sportsmates look basically the same. However, Resort feels different. It feels tighter, provides more interesting sports and game modes, and actually has a decent single-player mode. It’s far, far from perfect and doesn’t come close to addressing most of the first game’s issues, but it’s much more fun.

The Basics

Nintendo Switch Sports Resort features 12 sports, some of which are returning and some of which are brand new. From the top, you’ve got Tennis (which is Tennis), Bowling, Archery, Boxing, Volleyball (which is Tennis), Table Tennis (which is Tennis), Basketball, Golf, Thumb Wrestling, Prop Plane, Skateboarding, and Power Cruising. You can also warm up with some good ‘ol jump rope. It all takes place on the beloved Wu-Hu Island, though it’s been renamed to Spocco Resort.

You can dive right into any of the sports on offer, but first you’ll need a character. Both Sportsmates and Miis return here as well as unique Sportsmate bodies like a Bug or Jellyfish person, and you can customize at least the outfit of all of them. Characters do look a bit better than the original game—Sportsmate’s eyes have a little more light to them even if they still look like strange homunculi—but I still find the balance between cartoon and realistic detail hits the uncanny valley, particularly with the noodle arms. Characters don’t have proper elbows, so their arms curve in a very weird way and it looks wrong. 

The customization options upfront are pretty sparse, and the way you unlock more is by spending Spocco Points to roll the gacha in the Item Center. Spocco Points are earned by playing sports, and you need exactly 1,000 for one roll. You have up to three sets of items you can roll for at a time, with two resetting each week and the other being monthly. You select a set, get one item from it, and then you need to spend 1,000 more to get another item. Items are checked off from the set as you unlock them, so you can’t roll duplicates, but gacha still sucks. If you only want a specific item, you might have to grind out points for the entire set just to get it. If you don’t like anything in the set, well you’ll just have to wait a week or a month and see if something decent comes up next time. It’s just not fun, and I don’t know why they stuck with this method instead of a traditional shop. Even a shop with randomly unlocking items rolled out over the same time period would have been better. At least that wouldn’t have FOMO built-in.

Even so, this time around the customization options are much more varied and appealing. You’ve got everything from sports uniforms, to an aviator’s outfit, to shorts and a t-shirt, or even Mii costumes. You can also save some favorite looks or earn new reaction stamps and equipment for each sport. My personal favorite so far is a frying pan used as a tennis racket. Unfortunately though, all of these cosmetics are earned on a per-character basis, and any Guests are stuck purely with the basics as they can’t earn points without a console profile. It really should be on a per-console basis.

Tennis

Tennis (1-4 players) is the first sport on offer, arguably being the most iconic of the series, and it’s pretty much unchanged since Wii Sports. In a standard Match, you play doubles and try to win more sets than your opponent. If you’re a solo player, your partner is a holographic copy of you and you control both at the same time. You simply shake the Joy-Con (Joy-Con 1 and 2 are compatible here!) at the right time to send the ball back; the direction of your swing doesn’t matter. You can add some spin on the ball by twisting during your swing, but that didn’t have much effect in my experience. 

I’m of two minds about Tennis. I enjoy this simplified take on the sport, and it makes for some fun arcade-style action that just about anyone can pick up in two seconds. On the other hand, I think it could have used some additional complexity or control. I hate when I swing the Joy-Con to the left to try and tire out my opponent by making them run back and forth and it just goes right. I should be able to lob if I want to as well. While the basics are intuitive, I don’t think laymen will pick up on the fact that the timing of your swing determines your direction, despite that being a prominent loading screen tip. It doesn’t need to be as in depth as, say, Mario Tennis Aces, but just a tiny bit more would have freshened up the sport.

Tennis also has a Laid-Back Match (1-2 players) mode with a large, slow-moving ball. Intended for casual players, this feels a bit like a “baby” mode, but not in a bad way. Growing up, I played a lot of Wii Sports with my 2 year old brother, and while he loved shaking the remote and seeing things happen on screen, the ball was often too fast for him to hit. This is a great mode for young kids to play together or for a teen to adult to play with a young child, but it might be worth booting up at least once for everyone to see the novelty of a giant tennis ball. 

Bowling

Bowling (1-4 players) is another classic and a personal favorite, and it works a lot better here than it did in the previous title. Unlike Tennis, Bowling benefits greatly from the simplified controls, with you just having to set up your shot position and angle, then put some spin on the ball if you want. You’ve got the two expected modes here, Match and 100-Pin Game (1-4 players), but Match also has a Special variant with obstacles in the lane. Special mode also comes with four difficulty options: Beginner, Advanced, Expert, and Auto; I assume Auto dynamically adjusts your difficulty level based on how you’re doing. Obstacles include curved lanes (either vertically or horizontally), stationary or moving blockers, and even some moving platforms to cross gaps in the lane. 

Whatever mode you play, Bowling is a ton of fun and another personal favorite. It’s always a blast to try and go for a Turkey or even a perfect game, though I could only achieve the latter on the original Wii Sports so far. It’s also great to play online with the last player standing style returning from Switch Sports 1, and now the controls work properly!

Archery

Archery (1-4 players) is yet another favorite of mine from Wii Sports Resort, and is just as enjoyable here as it was back then. You’ve only got one basic mode here, but you can choose between two types of targets, standard bullseyes and larger ones divided into four sections. For the former, you want to hit as close to the center as possible, accounting for wind and drop off, while the latter asks the same but only in your colored quadrant. If you land an arrow in someone else’s section, they get points instead. From there, you’ve got four areas to choose from in ascending difficulty: Plaza, Beach, Plains, and Mountains. Yes, the Mountains level does put you in the volcano at one point. 

As interesting as the Special targets are, I think I prefer the Normal ones for the simplicity. They’re not bad by any means, I just enjoy the test of skill Normal offers. The different areas offer a lot of interesting variety in either mode, particularly with the wind, and mimicking a bow and arrow with two Joy-Con is always fun. Now if we could just get Link’s Crossbow Training in here…

Boxing

Yet another returning favorite (don’t worry, there’s only one more), Boxing (1-2 players) in Nintendo Switch Sports Resort is… Fine. You’ve only got the standard matches here, and controls are basically unchanged since the Wii: each Joy-Con stands in for your fists, and you can block, dodge, or punch with them just by moving. You can punch high to go for the face, or low to go for body shots. 

The only addition here is visible stamina, both for your health and punching power. The lower your Punch Gauge, the less damage your punches will do, so you might not want to keep up the assault constantly. Health is pretty self explanatory: run out and you’ll hit the mat and need to get up before the count hits 10, though you don’t need to shake the controller to get back up anymore, just wait. It has room for a lot of strategy and decision making, but I’ve found that just flailing around works pretty dang well, regardless of punching power. It’s just easier to wear your opponent down with tons of light hits rather than waiting for heavier punches. That could change on higher difficulty levels, but it’s done me pretty well playing online. Mostly though, this sport just makes me want to reinstall ARMS.

Volleyball

Volleyball (1-4 players) is exactly the same as it was in Switch Sports 1, which means it's still terrible. The sport is, in essence, a series of quick time events, with receiving, setting, spiking, and blocking all requiring you to shake the Joy-Con at the right time. That’s literally it. It’s Tennis but even further simplified, with even less control over the ball. You can aim slightly, but for the most part you’re just waiting for your opponent to miss the ball. Unless you’re playing alongside a friend, your partner is always an NPC too, so you’re just waiting around for about 3/4ths of the match.

There is a second mode here, Bump to the Beat (1-4 players), which turns passing into a rhythm game. It’s also not very good. Motion controls are simply not suited to precise timing. I could see Volleyball being decent with button controls, but there’s no way to play the game like that; you can’t even connect a pro controller while the game is running. 

You also can’t play Nintendo Switch Sports Resort portably. Well, you can play in Tabletop mode but you won’t be able to see what’s going on with the tiny screen at any reasonable distance from your eyeballs. I get that motion controls are the intended way to play, to recreate the feeling of each sport, but I maintain that button controls should have been included for accessibility. Not everyone can swing a Joy-Con around with wild abandon, and despite making games for everyone Nintendo repeatedly chooses to ignore non-ablebodied players with choices like this and their persistently lacking options menus. Nintendo could easily recreate the feeling of each sport with just the analogue sticks, but they simply choose not to.

Table Tennis

Our final Tennis variant, Table Tennis (1-2 players) is the most in-depth of the three, actually tracking your hand and swings with the motion controls. That tracks (pun intended) as the sport was originally introduced with Wii Sports Resort to highlight Wii Motion Plus. With the added detail, the sport is far more interesting than Volleyball or basic Tennis, though you can’t play doubles here. Keeping up the rally is a lot of fun, as you need to make sure you return the ball in bounds but somewhere that’ll be tricky for your opponent to hit. 

That idea is distilled into the secondary mode, Return Challenge (1-4 players), which challenges you to see how many times you can return the ball in a row while trying to hit cans that score you more points. It’s an enjoyable high-score challenge, and a fun overall sport.

Basketball

Basketball has by far the most amount of sub-modes, with Match (1-4 players), Three-Point Challenge (1 player), Three-Point Contest (2-4 players), and Five-Streak Battle (2-4 players). With half of those being two players or more, I haven’t been able to actually play the latter two modes, so we’ll focus on Match and Three-Point Challenge. Basketball first appeared in an update to Nintendo Switch Sports 1, it has players dribble, pass, steal, and shoot the ball to score points in two-on-two, half-court matches. If you have the ball, you can shake the Joy-Con to dribble towards the basket, press the top face button to pass to your partner, or press and hold ZR to start a jump shot, then requiring two more motion inputs for jumping then shooting. If you don’t have the ball but your partner does, you can shake the Joy-Con to quickly dash away from the person guarding you to open yourself up for a pass. The person guarding will need to shake the Joy-Con as well to catch back up. Finally, if you’re on the person with the ball, you can shake the Joy-Con to try and steal it from them, or jump to block their shot after they set up for it. If they miss or the other team steals the ball, the ball changes hands and everyone moves back to the half-court line.

It’s by far the most complex the controls get here, but despite all of that, the mode feels very shallow and poorly thought out. When playing against NPCs, it’s trivial to immediately steal the ball and shut them out from even trying to score. Shooting is a bit more difficult, but as long as you move the Joy-Con in a straight line and are close enough to the basket, you’ll probably score. Passing, on the other hand, is often far too risky of a proposition, and most of the time will just give the ball away to the other team. Online, where it’s actually more difficult to steal the ball, this discourages teamwork, leaving two out of the four players in the lurch. The sport feels a bit slapdash in that way, with neither offline nor online play providing a satisfying experience.

Three-Point Challenge is exactly what it says on the tin, providing you with a set of balls at various angles from the basket and asking you to swish as many of them as you can. It’s another score attack mode, and is decently fun once or twice. 

Golf

Yup, it’s golf. You and up to three friends can play three, nine, or 18 holes in a row from… a total of 27 holes?!? That’s a lot of golf to play, including returning course layouts from past games in the series as well as brand new ones. Designs vary from basic fairways and greens to massive waterhazards, bunkers dotted everywhere, or requiring long drives to tiny patches of green in a sea of rough. I’m not the biggest fan of golf, both here and in real life, but my dad loves it and this will provide him with hours upon hours of fun.

Controls are what you’d expect from the sport, using the Joy-Con to mimic a golf club and swing at the virtual ball. The Joy-Con are a lot harder to use here compared to a classic Wii Remote as there’s just not enough room for both of your hands, but the game does benefit from the enhanced motion tracking to curve your shot or hit just the right amount.

Actually hitting the ball is a bit of a different story. It requires a much lighter touch than you’d expect, but not too light or your swing won’t register at all. This caused my dad no end of grief when we played together, as he’d always try to swing, well, like he actually does on the golf course. I don’t think that’s an unreasonable assumption to make, but Nintendo Switch Sports Resort punishes you for it. He was also very frustrated by needing to recalibrate the Joy-Con before every single shot, and having to hold the trigger to start swinging from practice shots. There seems to be a strange disconnect between how Nintendo intended people play the sport, and how their target audience of people not terribly familiar with games actually want to play. It’s an enjoyable sport, but it takes a while to get a handle on how this particular iteration plays.

Thumb Wrestling

Thumb Wrestling (1-2 players) is the strangest inclusion, but shockingly fun. You hold the Joy-Con vertically to move your thumb/hand around, then press the trigger to slam your thumb down. The twist here is charging up, as you can charge your next pin up to three levels by holding your thumb down for a time. Obviously that makes you vulnerable to being pinned, creating an interesting dynamic between trying to charge up your own thumb while preventing your opponent from charging up. If you do get pinned, you need to shake your Joy-Con to break out, but a certain rhythm of shaking will help more than flailing wildly. 

While the sport is fun in NPC matches, multiplayer is where it really shines as that’s where the mind games come in. You can bait your opponent by only pressing the button for an instant for a fake out motion, stare each other down to see who will try to charge first, or both of you charge at the same time for a real powerhouse round. Thumb Wrestling is at its best in person, but online is still a blast too.

Prop Plane

Prop Plane is our first Leisure Sport, and the final personal returning favorite. It comes in three modes, each of which have you piloting a plane around Wu-Hu Island by holding the Joy-Con like a paper plane: Sightseeing Tour (1-2 players), Ball Battle (2-4 players), and Free Play (1-4 players). Sightseeing Tour is the same as it was in Wii Sports Resort, letting you roam around the island at one of three times of day for five minutes to pick up as many sightseeing spot cameras as you can. You still steer by tilting the controller, boost by thrusting forward, and brake by thrusting backward, but you can also fire your Balloon Blaster by awkwardly pressing or holding A or Y. There’s a sub-objective of popping all the white or huge balloons in each area of the island. 

Li’l Miss Reeds returns from Rhythm Heaven Groove to read each sightseeing log you collect out loud (you can turn it off if you wish), giving you some insight into how Wu-Hu has changed since it became Spocco Resort. There are also some secret Hibiscus medals hidden around to collect, which are fun to find. The biggest part of this series’ appeal, at least for me, was that it all took place in one, well, place. You might be able to spot another sport being played in the distance as you survey the archery range, which is always cool. Prop Plane lets you explore and see how it’s all connected, which makes it one of my favorite modes on top of just being a relaxing and fun time. You can experience more of the chill vibes in the Free Play mode, which lets you roam around without a time limit or any objectives.

Balloon Battle has you trying to collect the most balloons scattered around the island. There’s no Balloon Blaster here, so you can’t shoot them from a distance, but you can steal them from opponents by smacking into their plane. I was kinda hoping this would be closer to a dogfight mode like Star Fox, but sadly that was not meant to be. I can see this being fun and chill with the right group, but it didn’t really grab me.

Skateboarding

Skateboarding is the second Leisure Sport, and it also has Sightseeing Tour (1-2 players) and Free Play (1-4 players) modes, which are exactly the same as in Prop Plane but this time on land using a Skateboard. You hold the Joy-Con in Mouse Mode here, sliding back to kick forward and tilting up to jump. You can also shake the controller while in the air, while grinding, or just on the ground to do tricks. It’s a lot of fun, and I enjoy it for many of the same reasons as Prop Plane.

Skateboarding’s additional mode has a bit more sauce, though. Skate Sprint (1-4 players) tasks you with racing through various skateboarding courses set up around the island. A single player will be competing against the clock to get a gold time, while multiple players will be racing each other. This is also a blast, with each course being just tricky enough to master with multiple routes and different types of terrain that may slow you down. 

Power Cruising

The final and third Leisure Sport is Power Cruising, with the same modes as Skateboarding but on the water this time. You’ve got Sightseeing Tour (1-2 players), Sea Sprint (1-4 players), and Free Play (1-4 players). In each, you hold the Joy-Con (either one or two simultaneously) like the handles of a jet ski, tilting to turn as you hold one of the triggers to accelerate and rotate the controller to boost. It’s a fun sport, but I didn’t find it as alluring as its counterparts because there’s just not as much to see and do at sea. The controls also feel a little weird as your pair of Joy-Con aren’t actually connected by anything, giving steering a weightless feeling. Finding the right position for both controllers while also paying attention to where you’re going is an awkward task. This is another mode I think would be more enjoyable with alternative controls. 

Final Thoughts

There are a few additional ways to play most sports. All but the Leisure Sports have online modes, with Casual Online Play allowing you to select multiple sports to play for fun, with Ranked requiring you to pick a single sport. You can also join a Friend Lobby, where up to eight players can sport together. I wasn’t able to test this out, though.

One of my favorite modes is Island Crown, where you can rise through the ranks in each non-Leisure Sport to then challenge the champions, earning new cosmetic items along the way. These can get pretty difficult once you hit the top 5, but getting there is a cake walk. Once you’re number 1, however, there’s an additional, Legendary challenge awaiting you featuring the Miis that stood proud at the top of every sport in previous titles. It’s a cool throwback and nice to see these characters again, even if the Miis do look a little freaky here. 

Nintendo Switch Sports Resort still feels lacking in a lot of ways, but it’s also a lot of fun. Leisure Sports are a particular highlight, but there’s something to enjoy about almost every sport on offer. Almost. Hopefully, just like the previous game, more sports will be added in the future as updates too. Chambara, anyone?