Pack my bags and book me a one-way ticket to Wuhu Island. After its announcement in June, I was mildly excited for Nintendo Switch Sports Resort, mostly because of the prospect of returning to Nintendo’s vacation paradise after more than a decade since my last visit in Pilotwings Resort on 3DS launch day. After my first hands-on at San Diego Comic Con, I walked away filled with fuzzy nostalgia, but questioning how much a motion controlled sports party game could grab my attention in 2026, a full 20 years after the original Wii Sports had its TV-smashing moment. But after playing another hour plus and seeing how much fun I had in multiplayer, and how much there is to do in single player, it’s vaulted up to be one of my most anticipated games for the rest of the year. What’s happening here?
One key demographic for the Switch Sports series that I don’t fall into is the casual Nintendo gamer: someone who has Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Super Mario Party, the original Nintendo Switch Sports, maybe a Jackbox Party Pack or two, and not much else. You know, someone who has never had to click the “Show More” icon on their Switch because they don’t have enough games to fill the initial row. To be clear, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that type of player: many of my friends have Switch home screens that look exactly like that. Nintendo is bundling Nintendo Switch Sports Resort with the Switch 2 this holiday season, and in terms of getting that audience to upgrade, I think it’s a really smart move. Resort will be a great time for anyone with nostalgia for the original who just likes to pick up and play fun, simple games with their friends. That was never in doubt.
What has been in doubt is how much a player like me will get out of Resort, with so many other huge games constantly fighting for my attention. I was especially wondering this following 2022’s somewhat disappointing Nintendo Switch Sports, which I felt lacked compelling reasons to play it at launch and relied far too much on online play to get much out of it. I was ready to accept that Resort would be a game I play a little bit at a time for a very long time, breaking it out with friends or family on game nights over the course of the entire Switch 2 generation. And there is room in a library for games like that! So I was happy for it to play that role in my life. But I no longer feel this way: I’m ready for a weeks-long stay on Wuhu Island.
I think that’s mostly because Resort appears to be solving all of Switch Sports’ shortcomings. Spocco Square was nothing more than a video game menu that existed purely for you to select your next minigame. Wuhu Island is a place designed for competition, exploration, and leisure. Take Power Cruising (a trademark-free term for Jet Skiing) as an example. I can race my friends on a course that rewards speed and taking huge jumps off the waves as we bob and weave through obstacles just off of Wuhu’s shores.
Or, we can take a sightseeing tour of the water, taking five minutes to find as many landmarks as we can. Here, there are objectives and achievements to check off: I chased a pink dolphin until it rewarded me with a collectible, and elsewhere I had to line myself up to launch off a huge wave to grab another sparkly thing just out of my reach. At the end of the five-minute round, we saw an overhead view of the island, complete with a tracing of the path my co-op partner and I took around the island, reminiscent of Breath of the Wild’s Hero’s Path feature. We laughed at seeing where we went different directions, and when we met back up, and we talked about what we’d seen and discovered. I didn’t get to try this, but I’m told that there’s a free play mode for certain sports like Power Cruising where you can explore and chill for as long as you’d like with no timer; you just can’t unlock collectibles and achievements in that mode. This is just one sport, but there are many different ways to engage with it: competition, exploration, and leisure.
In a way, modes like this feel like a more successful realization of Mario Kart World’s Free Roam. You can easily explore in splitscreen with friends, collectibles and achievements are clearly marked and tracked, and they earn you points that can be spent on cosmetics for your Sportsmate or Mii character. It all feels fun, seamless to play with others, and well thought out in terms of rewards and goals to chase. And the denser, more self-contained layout of Wuhu Island means every area has something meaningful to uncover.
I explored Wuhu Island from two different angles in Skateboarding and Prop Plane. Skateboarding makes use of the Joy-Con 2 mouse controls, where I dragged the controller backwards as if it was my foot and my leg was the ground. I leaned left and right to turn, flicked the controller up to jump, and waggled it around to do spins and tricks in the air. I grinded on rails, crashed into the ocean to see what would happen (my character drowned and was returned to shore), and tried to find a path up to the island’s iconic volcano: Maka Wuhu. I ran out of time before I made it there.
So I took to the skies instead, using my plane to fly straight into the mouth of the volcano, as I did countless times in Pilotwings Resort back in the day. I was pleased to find a collectible deep within the volcano to reward my efforts. Soaring around the island revealed how much it has changed over the years: the distant golf course has a new resort hotel, there are additional smaller keys surrounding the main island, and the geography of everything has been shuffled a bit. The skies of Wuhu were stuffed with things to find: Landmarks to photograph and make note of, balloons to pop, and more. I spent a lot of time trying to use my water gun to shoot down my co-op partner, to no avail. Even with all this stuff to find and do, goofing around with no goal or objective is just as fun as it always was, and in part what I think this game is made for. It’s summer vacation! You’re supposed to just laze around and have fun.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.ign.com/articles/nintendo-switch-sports-resort-appears-to-solve-all-of-switch-sports-shortcomings-ign-preview
