Great multiplayer, but weak single player - Wii Sports feels more like a supped-up tech demo than a full fledged game.

User Rating: 7.2 | Wii Sports WII
By death919 | Review Date:
Gameplay: Wii Sports contains a total of 5 sports, some of which are awesome and some of which aren’t as good. The first sport is Wii Tennis. This is probably the best game on there, and is an absolute blast to play. The controls work perfectly and it’s especially fun to play with friends. Plus it gives you a good workout! The next sport is Wii Baseball. I didn’t think that this was as good as most of the other sports. It’s definitely a good concept, but the problem is the difficulty of getting points. I found it to be nearly impossible to hit the ball without getting a foul, and even if you do manage to hit the ball, if you don’t hit it out of the park then the catchers seemed to catch the ball more than half of the time! The third sport is Wii Bowling. This is the second best sport on the disc, and is really fun to play! It’s pretty addictive trying to beat your high score or playing with friends, and feels like you’re actually bowling! The fourth sport on the disc is Wii Golf. I’ve got kind of a mixed opinion on this one. It’s definitely fun to play, but it’s just so hard to be exact in terms of how hard you want to hit the ball, since if you swing with any amount of effort, you’ll max out the bar and swing as far as you can (meaning to fill up the bar 3/4 of the way, you have to hit it pretty lightly, which is really strange). The final sport is Wii Boxing. I found the controls to be pretty unresponsive for this game. It’s pretty hard to swing the way you want, dodge, block, etc… Even so though, it’s still surprisingly fun to play with friends! While the game is fun to play multiplayer, playing the game solo is extremely lacking. There isn’t really much incentive to play it by yourself at all, which is why it is tough to say that the gameplay is a 9 or a 10.

Graphics: Wii Sports is an alright looking game. The visuals are pretty basic, and nothing looks amazing in the game, but then again, nothing really looks bad either. The overall look is what you’d expect from this type of game. While I’m sure that these visuals could be easily pulled off by last-gen’s Gamecube, it’s hard to argue that Wii Sports isn’t a good looking game.

Sound: The sound in Wii Sports is, like it’s graphics, very basic. The sound effects are excellent and match their real life sound effects nicely, but there isn’t really a whole lot of music or anything of that type in Wii Sports. That makes this a tough category to rate: on the one hand, there isn’t really anything bad about the sound effects or music. However, on the other hand, there isn’t really anything great about the music or sound effects either. So, the audio aspect of Wii Sports is not bad, but not great either.

Value: Now, while the sports are fun to play and for the most part work really well with the Wiimote, there’s just an overall lack of things to do in the game. I mean, you can pick a sport and play a match of it against the computer (earning you “ranking points” in that particular sport), and there’s some Training things which test you in things such as how many times you can hit the tennis ball back before missing or how many home runs you can get in 10 tries (the game records your high scores for these), and there’s a daily Fitness Test that works similar to something like Brain Age, where you perform 3 tasks and it assigns you an age that matches your Fitness Level based on your performance in those tasks, but that’s about all there is to the game. There’s no actual “main game” or “story mode” or whatever you want to call it. It all seems more like an upgraded tech demo than anything else, and it’s hard to imagine anyone paying full price for this game (luckily for us North Americans, it was included with the Wii). The multiplayer is lots of fun, and it’s the type of game that you can keep coming back to with friends (until something like Super Smash Brothers Brawl comes out, anyways), but in terms of single player… well, put it this way: I’ve had my Wii for nearly a month and a half, and I’ve played this game by myself for about 15 minutes… So while Wii Sports may fill your Wii multiplayer sessions, it’s got a total lack of things to do in terms of single player, and it’s hard to imagine buying this game if it wasn’t packaged in with the Wii.

Tilt: Overall, Wii Sports is a great multiplayer game but a bad single player game. It’s hard to consider it as being much more than a supped-up tech demo, because there is an overall lack of substance to the game. So, is Wii Sports a bad game? No, of course it isn’t, it’s actually a lot of fun playing it with friends and the sports have enjoyable gameplay that work very nicely with the Wiimote. However, if this wasn’t already packaged in with the Wii, I wouldn’t really see any reason to pay full price for this game. So while Wii Sports is definitely a good display of the Wiimote’s capabilities, it’s not really an amazing “game” as a whole.

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