Nintendo Switch Sports Resort Review Round-up! 🏐 | Ep. 147

What's up and welcome to me you and switch to I am me Tom Tate and you are you so let's talk about switch to this is the latest and greatest Nintendo switch to news brought to every Tuesday and Friday and snackable five to 10 minute episodes.

If you're listening live today happens to be Tuesday. It is October 27. This is episode 147.

However, for me, it is Sunday, October 25. It's 720 a.m. on the East Coast.

I'm cheating a little bit because I'm traveling this week and I'll have limited technology with me. So no laptop.

I will have no way to podcast unless I'm just talking into my phone.

And I don't think that that would be a great listening experience for you.

So hopefully we don't miss too much news between now and real Tuesday.

We'll just have to see. I'll maybe keep you updated if anything humongous drops.

As promised on Friday, where we covered all the reviews for Final Fantasy Resonance.

I mentioned that I will be hyper focused on sharing the reviews for Nintendo Switch Sports Resort.

I read through a bunch of them. I want to give you a roundup of, you know, kind of how critics felt about this game. We'll get right into it.

Nintendo Switch Sports Resort released last Thursday, October 22nd.

It is $49.99 digitally and $59.99 physically.

Nintendo's doing that $10 off, you know, for digital strategy still.

So if you want the digital release, it's a little bit cheaper.

For a bit though, you could have picked this up for $50 physically as well over at Amazon and I think Best Buy.

I'm not sure if they're still doing this, but they've been kind of having their pre-order prices set to the digital prices.

That's how I picked up Ocarina of Time. I pre-ordered Ocarina of Time, which is arriving next week, and I picked it up for $10 cheaper than it would be if I bought it direct.

This game, Nintendo Switch Sports Resort, follows 2022's Nintendo Switch Sports Resort.

And it brings back Woohoo Island from Wii Sports Resort.

This time, though, it is kind of a full open world map. You can explore it freely.

There are 12 sports to play, tennis, volleyball, bowling, basketball, and golf.

All of those return from Switch Sports. There's new games.

We have archery and table tennis from Wii Sports Resort. We have boxing returning for the first time since the original Wii Sports. It's the one new game that

I saw in the Nintendo Direct that was pretty entertaining was Thumb Wrestling.

There's a new category of games called Leisure Sports, which includes a prop plane, which reminds me a little bit of Pilotwings, Power Cruising, which is basically jet skis, kind of harkens back to Wave Race, and then Skateboarding.

Skateboarding is cool because it uses the Joy-Con 2 mouse mode.

So you lay the controller flat on a table and you just kind of swipe it.

To push the board forward um two new modes come up in almost every review island crown is a single player ladder across nine sports where you climb the ranks, you face up against ai players.

Each sport has their own island champion that you'll go up against,

And Sightseeing Tour gives you five minutes to roam Woohoo Island in a leisure sports and grab collectibles.

So let's just check out some of these reviews. Nintendo Life, you know, we'll start high. Nintendo Life, Jim Norman reviewed this one.

He gave it a 9 out of 10. He's a big Switch sports fan.

His take is that this is what Switch sports should have been at launch back in 2022.

Boxing was his least favorite. it. He felt that the motion controls sometimes couldn't keep up with all the ducks, hooks, and jabs.

He flagged a few limits worth knowing. So apparently there's no local multiplayer in tabletop mode.

Also, he mentioned you'll need an extra Joy-Con 2 controller to play skateboarding with more than one friend because it requires that mouse control.

And the customization shop gives you random items instead of letting you pick what you want.

So a few nitpicks from jim uh here's a quote though to kind of sum up his, his review and i'm reading this verbatim after the stumbling start of its predecessor it's nice to see the series back on track in nintendo switch sports resort, while some of the 12 different sports might feel a little too safe most of the classics feel better than they've ever been and the newbies surprise and delight with some classic Nintendo intuition.

The joys, feels like the full package at launch, surprising amount of single-player content, shines in multiplayer both locally and online, great game mode variety for most sports, vast improvement in character customization, island crowned, brings a good amount of challenge, and the cons, some sports still feel a little samey, minor online annoyances, and my poor joints.

I guess he was feeling the pain. playing that game too long and he's kind of alluding to it like with full package at launch,

When Nintendo Switch Sports released in 2022, I picked that up at launch myself and not all of the sports were there. A lot of them came later in an update.

And honestly, by the time the update came, my family moved on from this game, and we downloaded the update, but I don't think we played more than 20 minutes of the update. So it is nice to know that this is more of a full package.

Polygon does not score its reviews, but Ollie Welsh's review was the most glowing one that I've read.

He calls it a masterpiece of casual gaming after spending some time defining what casual gaming looks like and means to him.

His big point is that turning Woohoo Island into an open world kind of changes everything.

You could just hang out and explore with friends instead of just competing one-on-one.

And he kind of mentions just being able to skate around with his seven-year-old, just skating around freely.

He also called skateboarding the best use of the Joy-Con 2 mouse controls yet.

It sounds like this game includes a lot of the fun and quirkier modes that we remember from back in the day.

Here is a quote from the Polygon Review. Most sports come with fun variants like the hilarious 100-pin bowling or the volleyball rhythm game Bump to the

Beat or Table Tennis' Return Challenge, in which you have to place returns precisely to knock over soda cans.

Playing these is a great way to learn the subtleties of the control schemes, because like all great casual games switch sports resort almost invariably hides sophistication within its approachable simplicity, and he closes his review saying by the way my in-laws came to visit while i was reviewing switch sports resort they stopped to buy a switch to on their way home so.

So he's kind of hearkening back to those days with Wii Sports when everyone played Wii Sports.

Like people were lining up to get a Wii that never bought a game console before.

Maybe that's going to happen. I don't know. Game Informer's Brian Shea gave it an 8 out of 10. He says it might be the strongest entry in the series.

He found the controls to be intuitive and that you can usually guess how to hold the Joy-Con before the tutorial explains it.

He also had trouble with boxing, though. I listened to his podcast yesterday, driving around, running errands, and he commented how he actually trained in boxing before in real life.

So he has a reference point, and he said it just wasn't natural enough in the game.

He also liked the new customizable characters over the Miis.

IGN's Jesse Vitelli gave it a 7 out of 10. He says Nintendo focused on more sports, more modes, more outfits, but it's wider than it is deep.

Here's his conclusion. He wrote, Nintendo Switch Sports Resort shines as the party game. It's meant to be perfect to bring to your friend's place or get the backyard barbecue bumping.

Its single-player options widen the package with a light campaign and an amusing free exploration mode, but it's not a big surprise that neither do quite enough to take the spotlight away from the highs of its multiplayer.

And while there are a few weak games like basketball and power cruising,

More exciting sports like archery, skateboarding, and even thumb wrestling make this a fun and playful collection overall.

Real quick, from the Nintendo Life and Polygon review roundups,

GameSpot gave it a 9 out of 10. Eurogamer gave it a 4 out of 5. VGC gave it a 4 out of 5.

As of recording this, it looks like Metacritic is giving it a 79 based on 62 critic reviews, and the user score is an 8.4.

So for context 2022 switch sports i think topped out around 72 we sports resort sits at 80, so it's right about there polygon also notes that every nintendo published switch 2 game this year has reviewed pretty well, i'm personally going to be picking this one up for christmas this is going to be a christmas gift it's already settled here so i won't have any hands-on thoughts or impressions for the next couple of months.

But this game does look good. It looks fun. I'm glad that it's a full package.

We play a lot of these sports in real life. So it should be fun to emulate these.

I'm personally excited for 100-pin bowling. I have fond memories of playing that on the Wii.

So it'll be good to get back into this one. Hopefully, it has a bit more traction than Nintendo Switch Sports, which again, we played for a little bit, but I feel like it lost its steam pretty quickly.

I also think that had like the leg band. Sometimes when you introduce some other gimmicks, like we had Ring Fit Adventure 2 and we played that for a month and then we just gave up on it, right? So sometimes it's easy just to be able to pick up and play.

All right, that's it for today. I'll link to all the reviews in the show notes if you wanna go deeper on any of them.

I will be back on Friday. I'll be back before Friday if anything major drops, but hopefully it's a relatively tame week. I wanna thank you so much for your time and your attention.

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