Nintendo’s motion-sports series has always needed a full room to make sense. On Switch 2 it finally gives the empty one a reason to turn on the TV, and that changes what the whole package is for.
The problem with a game that needs guests
Every game in this series has been designed around a single moment: the living room filling up, controllers passing from hand to hand, somebody’s uncle discovering that a bowling ball can be curved with a flick of the wrist. That moment is real, and it has sold consoles for 20 years. The trouble is what happens on the other six nights of the week. A game built entirely for guests spends most of its life on a shelf, waiting for them.
Nintendo Switch Sports, back in 2022, never solved that. It arrived with six events, a golf course promised for later, and a reward system that only paid out if you played online. Alone, there was very little to do in it. Nintendo Switch Sports Resort is the first entry that treats the solo player as a real audience rather than an afterthought, and that single design decision reshapes everything around it. Nintendo kindly provided a code for this review.
It is also a Switch 2 exclusive, which matters more than the name suggests. The Joy-Con 2 is doing things here the original controllers could not, and one of the twelve sports simply does not exist without it.
Wuhu Island, twelve sports and a jump rope
The setting is Wuhu Island, the tropical resort that hosted Wii Sports Resort in 2009, rebuilt for new hardware and populated by the Sportsmates introduced in the previous game. You can play as one of them or as a Mii, and both get the full wardrobe.
The lineup runs to twelve events. Nine are competitive: Boxing, Table Tennis, Archery, Tennis, Volleyball, Bowling, Basketball, Golf and Thumb Wrestling. Three are what the game calls Leisure Sports, built around moving freely across the island: Skateboarding, Power Cruising and Prop Plane. Jump Rope sits at the front as a warm-up, which is a small joke and a sensible suggestion at once, because some of these events will find muscles you had forgotten about.
Five of the competitive sports come straight over from the 2022 game. The rest are either revived from the Wii era or genuinely new, and the split between those groups explains most of what is good and most of what is frustrating about the package.
There is no story in any traditional sense, and nobody would want one. What the game has instead is structure, which is something its predecessor badly lacked.
The returning events, sharpened
Bowling is still the heart of the thing, and it still deserves to be. The motion is the same pendulum swing it has always been, with spin applied by a twist at release, and it remains the one event anyone can understand within a single frame. What has changed is the menu around it. Special lanes add obstacles to the alley, the 100-pin game returns from the Wii days in all its absurd, cathartic glory, and online bowling scales up to 16 players, which turns a quiet sport into a small tournament.
Golf, which the previous game added late through an update, is now present from day one with rounds of three, nine or 18 holes and up to eight players online. It is the most patient event in the collection and the one that rewards precision over enthusiasm. Putting in particular feels better than it has any right to with a controller held like a club.
Tennis keeps its familiar doubles structure and adds a Laid-Back Match with a bigger, slower ball, which is a smart concession to younger players and anyone who finds the standard rally speed punishing. Basketball brings a Three-Point Contest, a Three-Point Challenge and a Five-Streak Battle on top of its standard game.
Volleyball is the weak link among the returners. It still feels a beat behind your hands, the timing window for a good spike narrower than the motion suggests it should be. Bump to the Beat, a mode built around chaining well-timed receptions, does more for it than the main game does, because it isolates the part of volleyball the controls actually handle well.
The new arrivals: boxing, archery and a very large thumb
Table Tennis is the best evidence that the Joy-Con 2’s motion sensing is a real improvement rather than a line on a spec sheet. Returns respond to the angle and pace of your swing in a way that lets you place the ball deliberately, and the difference between a lazy push and a sharp, angled drive is something you feel immediately. Return Challenge, where you aim for cans on the far side of the table, turns that precision into a game of its own. Online, table tennis is a strict one-on-one affair.
Archery is the most tactile event in the collection. You hold one controller as the bow and draw back with the other, and the pull carries a physical tension that no button press could reproduce. Wind matters, distance matters, and a split-target rule, where each player aims for their own section of the same target simultaneously, turns a contemplative sport into a surprisingly competitive one.
Boxing is the event I would rank last among the newcomers, and the reason is tracking rather than design. The structure is sound: punch, guard, counterpunch, wear down the opponent’s stamina, land the knockout. But when you start combining ducks with hooks and jabs at speed, the controllers occasionally lose the thread, and in a sport built on reaction, a missed read is a lost round. It is enjoyable played loosely. It does not hold up under pressure.
Thumb Wrestling is the surprise, and I did not expect to be writing that sentence. You hold a single Joy-Con 2 upright and fight with your thumb on the stick, trying to pin your opponent’s thumb before they pin yours. On paper it is a novelty. In practice it has an unexpected tactical layer, mostly built around a power-up that inflates your thumb to an enormous size and makes pinning dramatically easier, so the question of when to spend it becomes the whole match. The obvious objection, that two people on the same sofa could simply do this with their real hands, misses the point. The game adds timing, escalation and a referee who never argues.
The leisure sports and the island itself
The three Leisure Sports are where the island stops being a backdrop and becomes a place.
Power Cruising has you hold the controllers like handlebars, twist back to rev, and lean to steer across the water. Prop Plane asks you to tilt the controller like a toy aircraft and fly wherever you like. Skateboarding is the event that justifies the Switch 2 exclusivity on its own: it uses the Joy-Con 2’s mouse mode, so you push the board by sliding the controller along a surface, then lift and flick it to perform tricks.
Each Leisure Sport offers three ways in. Sightseeing Tour is a timed hunt for Spocco Photos, collectible snapshots scattered across Wuhu’s landmarks. Free Play removes the clock entirely. And each has a competitive mode of its own: Skate Sprint and Sea Sprint for racing, and Ball Battle for the plane, a dogfight in which you steal balls from your opponents in midair. Ball Battle is the strangest idea in the game and one of the best.
Skateboarding is also the event that divides people most, and I understand why. The mouse controls are clever, and once the motion clicks, pushing along a promenade by sweeping your hand across a coffee table feels oddly natural. Getting there takes longer than any other event in the collection, and steering never quite reaches the instinctive ease of the plane or the jet ski. It is the one sport I would not hand to a first-time player at a party. As a solo activity, explored at your own pace, it earns its place.
Taken together, the Leisure Sports are what make the island feel inhabited. Hunting photo spots from the air, then racing past the same landmark on the water, builds a sense of geography that none of the arena sports can.
Island Crown, the closest thing to a story
This is the mode that changes the game’s purpose. Island Crown gives each of the nine competitive sports a ladder of computer opponents, starting gently and climbing toward a resident champion. Aya rules boxing, Yunsu table tennis, Ximena archery. Chloé and Moritz hold the tennis title as a pair, as do Lingling and Youyou in volleyball and Ada and Kanin in basketball. Aaliyah owns the bowling lanes, Filippo the golf course, and Isamu, inevitably, the thumb-wrestling mat. Beat a champion and the game hints that a seasoned master of that sport is still waiting.
It sounds slight, a list of opponents with names. In practice it does exactly what the series has always lacked. It gives every sport a destination, an escalating challenge, and a reason to learn the deeper techniques that most players never discover at a party. Several rungs use special rulesets, so the climb does not feel like the same match repeated. The early opponents are almost apologetic in how easily they fold. The champions are not, and by the time I had taken every crown, a handful of those matches had demanded genuine improvement rather than luck.
Champions also hand over their own outfits when you beat them, which ties the ladder directly into the customization system and gives each victory something visible to show for it.
Sportsmates, Miis and a wardrobe you earn offline
The previous game locked its cosmetic rewards behind online play, which meant the people most likely to enjoy dressing up their characters, younger players and families, were the least likely to earn anything. That decision is gone. Spocco Points now arrive from every match you finish, online or offline, solo or with friends, and they are spent in the Item Center on clothing, sporting equipment, hairstyles and more.
The Item Center rotates its stock on a weekly and monthly basis, and its items are drawn at random from each collection. That randomness is my main complaint about the system. If I want a specific hat, I would rather be allowed to choose it than roll for it, and some of the rotating collections recycle styles from the previous game. It is still a far fairer arrangement than before, and between champion outfits, the Item Center and the rewards that come with regular play, the wardrobe grows steadily without ever feeling like a grind.
You can save five Favorite Looks and switch between them before each sport, a small feature that turns out to be more useful than it sounds. A tennis outfit and a bowling outfit are, apparently, a matter of principle.
Image, sound and the Joy-Con 2
Visually, this is a clean, bright and deliberately simple game. Wuhu looks the best it ever has, and the plane is where that shows most, because it is the only event that lets you take in the whole island at once. The Sportsmates themselves remain divisive. They are more expressive and far more customizable than Miis, but their smooth, slightly anonymous design gives the whole thing a generic sheen that the chunkier, more characterful Wii-era look never had. It is a deliberate choice and a defensible one, and I still prefer the island to the people on it.
The game supports HDR on compatible televisions and surround sound, and both are worth enabling. Sound matters more in this series than it gets credit for. The crack of a clean return and the thud of a jab that lands are the cues that tell your body the motion worked, often a fraction before your eyes confirm it, and the mix here understands that job.
The real technical story is the controllers. Everything in this collection depends on how faithfully your hands translate to the screen, and the Joy-Con 2 makes boxing the only event where I ever doubted the reading. Table tennis and archery in particular feel sharper than anything the series managed on Wii or original Switch hardware. Mouse mode, meanwhile, is not a gimmick bolted on for the sake of it. Skateboarding is built around it, and it shows a direction for motion games that the series has never explored before.
Playing it in a real living room
This is a game for the television. It supports TV mode and tabletop mode, and it does not support handheld play, which makes sense for a collection built on waving controllers around but is worth knowing if your Switch 2 rarely leaves its dock. Give yourself space, too. Several of these events invite wide swings, and a tight room turns tennis into a contact sport.
Locally, most events take up to four players, with Boxing and Thumb Wrestling limited to two. Every player needs a controller, and here is a useful detail: original Joy-Con work for every sport except Skateboarding, which requires the mouse sensor of the Joy-Con 2. If you have a drawer of older controllers, most of the game is already covered. A full four-player skateboard session, on the other hand, means four Joy-Con 2 controllers.
Online play is built around two tiers. The Pro League matches you against players of similar skill, starting at rank E and climbing as you win. Casual online play records nothing, which is exactly what you want for a quick game with strangers on a weeknight. The Leisure Sports are available online only through Friend Lobbies, which keeps the free-roaming modes among people who know each other. Connections held steady across the sports I played online, and while the lobby flow could be smoother in places, nothing about it got in the way of a match.
Accessibility in the broadest sense remains the series’ great strength. The barrier to entry is still nearly zero, and the Laid-Back tennis match, the gentle opening rungs of Island Crown and the slow pace of golf all give hesitant players a way in. Island Crown and the online ranks then give committed players somewhere to go. That range, from a grandparent’s first bowl to a ranked table-tennis match, is the widest the series has ever covered.
What did not make the trip
The loudest argument around this game is about what it left behind, and the argument is fair. Three sports from the 2022 game are absent: football, badminton and chambara, the swordplay event that dates back to Wii Sports Resort itself. Football in particular was the most inventive thing the previous game did, and its absence is felt. Chambara’s absence is stranger still, given that the setting is the very island where swordplay first appeared.
The second complaint follows from the first. Tennis, Volleyball and Table Tennis all sit in the same broad family of net-and-racket timing games, and across a long session they can blur together. Twelve sports is a healthy number, but the variety inside those twelve is narrower than the count suggests. A sport like disc golf, or anything that used the controllers in a third distinct way, would have done more for the collection than a third net game.
None of this undoes what the game achieves, but it does mean returning players should come in knowing that this is a reshuffled lineup rather than an expanded one. What has grown is everything around the sports: the modes, the structure, the reasons to keep playing.
Verdict
Nintendo Switch Sports Resort is the most complete game this series has produced, and its quiet achievement is that it finally works when nobody else is home. Island Crown gives every competitive sport a ladder worth climbing, offline rewards fix the most unfair decision of the previous game, and the Leisure Sports turn Wuhu Island back into a place you want to explore rather than a menu with a beach painted behind it. Table Tennis, Archery and Thumb Wrestling show what the Joy-Con 2 can do, and Skateboarding shows where motion control could go next.
I will be honest about where it slips. Boxing’s tracking falters under pressure, Volleyball still drags, the racket sports overlap more than they should, and the losses of football and swordplay leave gaps that the new events do not fully fill. None of those is serious enough to stop a party, and the party is still where this game is at its loudest and best.
Buy it if your Switch 2 lives under the television and your living room fills up even occasionally, and buy it with more confidence if you play alone, because for the first time in this series that is a genuinely good way to spend an evening. Skip it if you play almost exclusively in handheld mode, or if football was the reason you kept the previous game installed.
