W hen the first Nintendo Switch Sports brought the effortless fun of Wii Sports back into my living room in 2022, I was frankly delighted . My small children discovered the pleasure of waving a controller around in enthusiastic imitation of a tennis player, and the surprising subtlety of virtual bowling, working out how to twist the wrist just right to guarantee a strike. I did not expect this game to become a family fixture for the next several years as my kids got older and climbed up the online ranks in all six of its sports (plus the two that were added as free updates). Switch Sports is so beloved in my household that the release of Switch Sports Resort this week is the most anticipated gaming event of the year. To be fair, my children are a bit young for Grand Theft Auto.
Nintendo Switch Sports Resort brings three of the six sports back – tennis, bowling, and volleyball – alongside golf and basketball. Then there are seven entirely new sports: boxing, table tennis, archery, thumb wrestling, skateboarding, jetski, and piloting a little prop plane. They are all intuitive, easy to get the hang of on the first or second attempt – some have more legs than others, in the long run – and all of them, crucially, are a little bit silly. Thumb wrestling in particular is cheerfully absurd, giving your characters gigantic thumbs on hands the size of their heads.
Every sport here is fun. In skateboarding you use the controller like a mouse, pulling it towards you to propel yourself forwards on the board and tilting it to steer through surprisingly challenging courses, lifting it into the air to jump and spin for tricks. Archery is perfectly intuitive, boxing enjoyably frenetic (especially when played with a seven-year-old), table tennis energisingly competitive, letting you spin and smash the ball with nuanced wrist movement. Almost all of these sports work exactly as you’d expect, with the exception of basketball, whose real-world speed and flashiness are replaced here with methodical turn-taking.
Touring the resort on a jetski or in a plane is more peaceful, reminiscent of Wave Race and Pilotwings, two long-dormant Nintendo series whose DNA is clearly evident in the Wii Sports lineage. On the jetskis, you can follow pink dolphins leaping through the waves. As you pass over the island’s stadiums, cafes and beaches in the plane you will see that they are busy with tiny people, watching a match or lazing on the sand. When you’re skating or soaring around you realise just how big and lively it actually is.
This gloriously unnecessary attention to detail gives this collection of sports games a sense of place and a holiday atmosphere that’s irresistibly appealing. The music is a sunny as the setting, full of guaranteed earworms. I spent a bunch of time dressing up my little character in outfits that you win by ranking up in the island leagues for each sport, a welcome addition that gives some structure to playing by yourself when you aren’t handing controllers around to friends and family. Variants on every sport also up the longevity: obstacle courses in bowling, for instance, or a three-pointer shooting contest in basketball.
After a week of daily play, it has become clear that Switch Sports Resort will not be going back on the digital shelf for some time yet. It is perfect for a Saturday afternoon with friends, but it also has enough going on beneath the surface to sustain the long-term attentions of an enthusiastic child. In other words, it is exactly what you want from a family video game – and as a bonus, it gets everyone off the sofa.
