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