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The Switch 2 compilation explodes the possibilities of casual gaming as if it was nothing
Casual gaming is a term that most of us who are passionate about the video game medium are conditioned to hear as a pejorative. Casual games are superficial, we think reflexively. In trying to please everyone, they're designed for the lowest common denominator. They're shiny and bland, lacking grit and friction.
Casual gaming can encompass real beauty, though. It can include PopCap's blissful dopamine machines like Bejeweled, or Regency Solitaire’s delightfully frivolous mashup of solitaire and Jane Austen. It can also come in the form of 2006's Wii Sports, the fourth-best-selling game of all time, the game that sold 100 million consoles, the game that changed the gaming landscape. Until it didn't.
Nintendo's casual gaming era during the Wii and DS days seems like a blip now. Boxed out of its birthright by PlayStation and Xbox and a hardware arms race it didn't believe in, Nintendo, through a mix of desperation and inspiration, found undiscovered country: new players, new ways to interact with games, and a new aesthetic of calm minimalism and self-improvement. But those new players proved tough to cultivate in the long term, and when Switch hit big, Nintendo eagerly ran home to the fans.
People were left behind. People like my in-laws, who like video games, who are always game for a bout of Tekken with their grandkids, who play Royal Match on their phones, and whose Wii is still under the TV but hasn't been turned on in years.
Casual is a constituency, then, one that's been all but abandoned to the absentee landlords of the smartphone app stores. Casual is also what it says it is: a vibe, a skillfully curated atmosphere. It's relaxed, it's upbeat, it's easy and chill. Everyone is welcome.
If casual were a place, it would be Wuhu Island. Wuhu is the setting of Wii Sports Resort, the 2009 sequel to Wii Sports, and now it's back in Nintendo's latest motion-control sports compilation, Nintendo Switch Sports Resort for the Switch 2. Wuhu is a paradise of healthy leisure and sporting spirit, where quirky avatars in colorful outfits compete under crystalline blue skies on golf links of emerald green. The architecture is cleanly modern but also voluptuously curved, and the soundtrack is cheerful muzak, crying seagulls, and constant applause.
In Wii Sports Resort, Wuhu Island was a fun backdrop for the usual minigame suite. In Switch Sports Resort, it's a place: an open-world map you can skate on, fly over, and jet ski around. It's like a giant 3D Mario game level, hiding secret caverns and garlanded with thrilling challenge runs.
This is Switch Sports Resort's greatest, but not only, addition to the Nintendo sports canon. There are three vehicle-based sports (amusingly classified as leisure sports, as if everything else on Wuhu was serious business): prop plane, skateboarding, and power cruising (jet skis). In all three, you can freely explore the island in Free Play and hunt for collectables and challenge missions in Sightseeing Tour, as well as participate in competitive races and battles.
Free Play and Sightseeing Tour are simple enough sandboxes, yet they revolutionize Switch Sports. They enrich the whole thing by linking the island together into a contiguous location with its own culture and atmosphere. They provide plenty of satisfying, free-flowing gameplay, especially for a solo player. They also open up a new social mood. If you don't feel like competing, you can just hang, skating or flying or jet-skiing around, exploring together and playing freely. At leisure. (My 7-year-old got stressed out by some sports, but we spent ages joyfully doing nothing in skateboarding Free Play.)
All three leisure sports are sheer pleasure to control — especially the all-new Skateboarding, which is the greatest application yet for Joy-Con 2 mouse controls. Swipe the mouse back to kick yourself forward, tilt to steer, tip it on to its end for nose or tail manuals, lift to jump, and flick for tricks that grant a speed boost when you land. Hit ZR to slide rasping to a stop, trailing sparks. It's so intensely satisfying. Nobody can match Nintendo's designers for the tactility and invention of their control schemes, and this is one's a peach.
Of the nine non-leisure sports, tennis, basketball, and volleyball return from Nintendo Switch Sports, along with the perennial classics, bowling and golf. Archery and table tennis return from Wii Sports Resort, while boxing makes its first appearance since the original Wii Sports. Then there's the all-new thumb wrestling.
There's no such thing as the perfect Nintendo sports lineup; bowling and golf aside, it will always be a rotation where a new or returning favorite is balanced out by a sad loss. I mourn Switch Sports' chambara sword fighting and badminton. Thumb wrestling is good for a laugh, but one of the few sports here without real depth or an interesting alternate play mode.
What a joy to welcome boxing back, though, in an interpretation that rejects overexcited flailing in favor of thoughtful and strategic jabs. Archery, too, is magnificent: deeply rewarding to control with a devious multiplayer variant. In the latter, each player is assigned a pie-chart section of the target and presented with an elegant balance of risk and reward: aim for higher points at the center, and you're more likely to land an arrow in an opponent's slice, gifting them points instead.
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.
Another brilliant addition, and another great way to discover the sports' deceptive depth, is Island Crown. This is something the Nintendo sports games have been crying out for: a substantial single-player mode with meaningful progression. In each of the nine non-leisure sports, you start ranked 20th and work your way up a leaderboard of colorful opponents. (I especially liked the table-tennis player Michel, with his silver-fox locks and waxed mustache, and the elegantly severe archery matriarch Florence.) In some sports, like boxing, the opponents act as an artfully scripted tutorial, teaching you techniques as you work around their different styles and weaknesses.
Switch Sports Resort is superb in local multiplayer for up to four players, of course, and there's also a robust suite of online options. The nine non-leisure sports are available in both Casual Online Play and the ranked Pro League, with Golf and Bowling supporting up to eight players, while leisure sports can be enjoyed with friends. The friend lobbies have a nifty feature allowing a group to split up into individual huddles to play sports with smaller player numbers before reconvening.
In another consequential change, you can earn points toward character customization items through any kind of play, not just online, as was the case with Switch Sports. The expanded customization suite includes outfits, titles, nameplates, custom equipment, and graphic stamps that can be used as quick emotes during play. It's bursting with humor and style, with a Splatoon-level fashion meta.
Between the customization, a new achievements system, Island Crown, and the enormous Sightseeing logs to complete, Switch Sports Resort has filled a minigame compilation out into a dense and rewarding ecosystem of stuff to do. This has an obvious appeal, especially to solo players. But in a casual game, introducing a designed superstructure like this is a risk. It might muddy its purity and complicate its immediacy. It might smother the game's social effervescence with rote box-ticking.
Nintendo, however, has walked this line with typical grace. Nintendo Switch Sports Resort has quietly become a very big, complex, video-game-y game, but it's still perfectly breezy and simple to navigate. When you discover a new way to play within it, it's just enriching and joyful.
As befits a casual game, Nintendo has pulled off something exceptionally difficult and made it look effortless. Nintendo Switch Sports Resort is a world in which enjoyment, discovery, challenge, and beauty seem to multiply the longer you spend with it. Yet it extends its welcome to anyone, and crucially, it gives every player permission to uncover as little or as much of its possibility as they want. Casual games never get called masterpieces, but that's exactly what this is.
By the way, my in-laws came to visit while I was reviewing Switch Sports Resort. They stopped to buy a Switch 2 on their way home.