Wii Sports Resort Review [Wii]

27 Jul 2009 at 16:50:11 by Tim McDonald
Systems used to review this title: (WII)

I feel insignificant. It's hard not to, with something like this, because it doesn't matter what I think of Wii Sports Resort: it's going to sell by the truckloads. Either you know, instinctively, that Wii Sports Resort is Like Totally The Best Thing Ever, or you know, instinctively, that the Wii is a kiddy toy for babies, and this can't possibly be fun because it doesn't have exploding heads. This review's for those of you who aren't six.

As something that packs the much vaunted MotionPlus, allowing 1:1 replication of your Wiimote movements, it's going to do well. As a sequel to Wii Sports, beloved of casual gamers everywhere, it's going to do well. Either way, yes, Wii Sports Resort is going to sell massively, so it's probably for the best that it's a solid title, because if it wasn't I'd have to climb naked onto a roof and scream about how everyone who buys it is an idiot, and the last time I did that I got arrested. But then that was at a school, and I was carrying a tazer and a colostomy bag at the time. And screaming about bats.

I digress.

Wii Sports had five games: bowling, tennis, baseball, boxing, and golf. These were of mixed quality. Golf and bowling were fantastic fun, particularly with groups of non-gamers. Baseball pitched (no pun intended) its difficulty too high for many, tennis got dull fairly quickly, and boxing was a tad too spammy.

Wii Sports Resort has twelve: sword fighting, air sports, canoeing, power cruising, wakeboarding, frisbee, cycling, archery, basketball, table tennis, golf, and bowling. These are further built upon with each having a few different game modes available – bowling, for instance, has standard ten-pin bowling, as well as 100-pin bowling, and a “spin control” mode, which places obstacles on the lane and asks you to use positioning and careful spin in order to knock down the pins. This adds up to a huge amount of variety.

Bowling, golf, and table tennis are all fairly similar to their incarnations in Wii Sports. Golf at least comes as a bit of a disappointment – there are nine new holes, in addition to the previous nine, but not much has changed. It's a lot easier to hook or slice the ball thanks to the MotionPlus controls, but it doesn't feel significantly different. Table tennis, despite being almost identical to tennis, feels a better fit for this sort of game than real tennis, not least because of the lack of movement or positioning in the controls which lets you focus solely on making the shots you want to make. Bowling on the other hand feels a lot better. Ignoring the sheer cathartic joy that results from the sound of eighty pins clattering over from a domino effect in 100-pin bowling, it simply controls a whole lot better. It's far, far easier to spin the ball in the direction you want it to spin, and positioning yourself to compensate for - if you're anything like me - what you perceive as controller errors isn't nearly so necessary. Presumably because I was right, they were controller errors, and the more accurate MotionPlus doesn't have those problems. Vindicated.

The new games are equally hit and miss. Most of the water sports, which thankfully are of the aquatic kind, are fairly throwaway; canoeing will do little but hurt your arms, power cruising is a fairly pedestrian time trial through gates, and wakeboarding is a dull Tony Hawk rip-off. Archery is fun for a while, despite being rather reminiscent of Sonic & Mario at the Olympic Games, and frisbee is a simple act of throwing a frisbee at a target area, potentially popping a balloon on the way.

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