Nintendo Switch Sports Resort, the newest entry in Nintendo's motion-controlled minigame series, packs more than bowling and boxing. Alongside the familiar sports, the collection includes three leisure activities, Prop Plane, Skateboarding and Power Cruising, that drop players into an open-world version of Wuhu Island, the fictional setting that has anchored Wii Sports games since the Wii era.
According to a review published by Polygon this week, those three modes are where the collection does its most interesting work. Prop Plane has players hold a Joy-Con like a paper airplane and tilt it to fly through the island's caves and skies. Skateboarding uses the Switch 2's mouse controls, letting players kick a virtual board across the ground to examine the environment up close. Power Cruising puts players on a jet ski and has them twist a Joy-Con like a handlebar to steer through the water surrounding the island.
All three can be played as five-minute timed runs or in an untimed freeplay mode, and all three are built around the same scaffolding Nintendo used for Mario Kart World's Free Roam mode: collectible photo spots, hidden missions and small rewards scattered across the map. Polygon's review found Wuhu Island stuffed with balloons to pop while flying, dolphins to chase while jet skiing, and hidden resorts and caves tucked between the island's sport-specific zones, each of which lines up with a corresponding minigame, so flying out to sea eventually reveals the golf course and its laid-out holes.
Picking up where Mario Kart World left off
The review drew a direct line between Sports Resort's leisure modes and Mario Kart World's Free Roam, which launched with the Switch 2 last June. Polygon's reviewer described Free Roam at launch as a promising but underbaked idea, criticized for thin rewards and dead space between objectives, and credited Sports Resort with tightening that same open-world concept into a denser, more purposeful package. The comparison extended back further too, to Super Mario 3D World's spin-off Bowser's Fury, which Polygon cited as an earlier Nintendo experiment in compact open-world design built around an existing franchise.
None of this changes what Switch Sports Resort costs or when it's available, details the review didn't address, and nothing here says Nintendo plans to expand the format further. But the review's framing of Sports Resort as an iteration on Mario Kart World's free-roam template suggests Nintendo is treating Wuhu Island's open-world modes as a proof of concept rather than a one-off.
That matters because Nintendo has at least one more open-world game coming to Switch 2 that could inherit the same ideas. Polygon's review closed by pointing to Kirby and the World Beyond as a likely test of whether Nintendo keeps favoring compact, detail-dense worlds over sprawling ones as it builds out the console's open-world ambitions. Whether that holds depends on a game that hasn't shipped yet, and reviewers haven't weighed in on it.
GDFiled by The Games Desk
Consoles, handhelds, PC gaming and the platforms and hardware behind them.
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