Key Preview Takeaways:
- Nintendo is bundling Nintendo Switch Sports Resort with Switch 2s this holiday season.
- Wuhu Island is really fun to explore in a relaxed, non-competitive atmosphere.
- There are certain sports from the series I’d swap out for some of what’s here, but overall, it’s a fun lineup of activities.
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.
But you can still turn up the heat when it’s time to compete. Thumb Wrestling will likely be a bore against the computer – it’s just too simple – but against a human opponent, it’s absolutely hilarious as you try to bait the other person to put their thumb down, and just laugh at the absurdity of two adults digitally thumb wrestling each other. We also bowled, and it’s pretty much unchanged from Wii Sports’ original winning formula, but it’s honestly still a classic. I played Archery again, too, which remains one of my all-time favorites. This time, we played a competitive mode where one quarter of the target is assigned to each player. That means it’s risky to aim for a bullseye: if you miss your quarter of the center and hit someone else’s, you hand them a bunch of points. As the round progresses, the target will start to rotate, or adjust the size of each quadrant to put the leader at a disadvantage to allow for last-second comebacks, which is a very fun – and very Nintendo – way to keep things interesting.
I played a round of Table Tennis, which was never one of my favorites, and still feels kind of forgettable here, especially when standard Tennis is also one of Resort’s 12 sports. And while we’re splitting hairs, volleyball is here, too, which makes for three net sports in the package. I would have much preferred another sport that makes use of the island itself: I remember swordfighting hundreds of Miis while trekking across the entire island in Wii Sports Resort, and it breaks my heart that it has been cut from Resort’s roster of activities. And although it wasn’t in the original Resort, this series desperately needs baseball back, too.
On the other hand, Boxing has returned for only the second time since the original (remember Wii Sports Club on Wii U? No, just me?), and it’s great to see one of the OGs again. It was here that Nintendo showed off one of the new single-player elements, where you climb a ladder of increasingly difficult CPU opponents to become the champion in that given sport. It’s like a miniature campaign, and while the lowest ranked opponent I boxed was ridiculously easy – they almost should have called the fight early for his health and safety – I’m looking forward to moving up the ranks. It’s just another example of how much offline single-player content Nintendo has included this time around.
I’m stunned at how excited I am for Nintendo Switch Sports Resort. I plan to 100% this game, which is not something I would have said two weeks ago. I’m still not entirely thrilled with the sports lineup – I would trade Table Tennis and Volleyball for things like Swordplay, Baseball, or Frisbee – but what is here is shaping up to be really fantastic. Don’t sleep on this one: I think it’s going to be an enormous improvement on Nintendo Switch Sports and a fantastic return to one of my favorite settings in Nintendo history. I’ll see you on Wuhu Island.
While you’re here, check out these recent previews of other big upcoming games we’ve checked out recently!
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