Sports Story Review

Golf Story was a surprise gem. Blending solid golf mechanics, satisfying RPG elements and a whimsical narrative made for a fantastic little game that could stand proudly alongside heavy hitters like Mario and Zelda in the Switch’s first-year line-up. Fast forward five years and we finally have the long-awaited follow-up in Sports Story. That long development time has resulted in an overstuffed yet undercooked sequel not quite worthy of its predecessor’s adoration, but still has a lot to offer those willing to overlook its shortcomings. 

The story sees the return of your main character and his companions from the first game. A somewhat incohesive series of events ensue involving gangs, a conniving mega-corporation, dungeons, espionage, pirates, royals, spirits, and lots of different sports. It’s all rather nonsensical and struggles to paint a particularly coherent narrative, but the beats along the way are plenty of fun nonetheless, and undoubtedly remain the highlight of the package. With sharp writing and witty humour, and excellent use of text speed, size and movement used to great effect to convey emotion, there is no shortage of laughs to be had. An option to slightly increase the text speed would have been nice, but aside from that, you’ll no doubt find yourself chuckling away at fantastical adventure and its characters. 

You’ll venture across a large overworld map, regularly stopping in at new locales filled with colourful characters and heaps of things to do. Unfortunately, this game relies heavily on tedious fetch quests to pad out each area. Multiple times I had to find item A to bring to person B, who would then give me item C to give to person D, with this process sometimes repeating nearly a dozen times. In a way, it does encourage exploration, but not everything is tracked via the menus and there is no map or waypoints to view where people are, so larger areas can result in a fair bit of aimless wandering as you try to find the next person in the chain of things to do. 

Obscure mission design and objectives permeate the experience, and the UI often feels like an additional burden. Menus are messy and a far cry from the crisp, intuitive interface found in Golf Story. Single-use items that have already been used needlessly hang around in your bag with dozens of other items that have no way of being sorted. Having a face made of only a handful of pixels be the only reminder of who gave you a quest can be frustrating. Needing to walk back to the entrance of an area with no option to quickly return to the overworld adds extra time floundering when you’re looking for your next objective. None of these alone are overly egregious, but they combine for an adventure that can feel a tad clumsy and unnecessarily laborious.

When you’re not on mindless fetch quests or chatting up the local denizens, you’ll be playing sports. Mostly golf, sometimes tennis, and occasionally you’ll try your hand at fishing, cricket, BMX riding, soccer, volleyball, baseball, and even remote-control car racing. It should come as no surprise that golf is the most fleshed out of the bunch, lifting largely from what came before it. Some changes have been made to button functionality of which I’m not a fan, with the ability to easily survey the surroundings with the right stick gone, and the whole golf interface being less clean and intuitive than before. With that said, the core golf game is still a lot of fun, and landing the perfect shot remains as satisfying as ever. Golf also gets incorporated into story in creative ways, from competing in mini golf and 9-hole tournaments to ringing bells and lobbing explosives at rubble to clear a path. The addition of different types of golf balls, such as vector balls that redirect towards the hole, skimmer balls that bounce on water, or steel balls that sacrifice distance to reduce the effect of wind, add an extra layer of strategy to proceedings that are fun to master.

Tennis is the other major addition, with a lengthy Tennis Academy side story taking up a large chunk of the game. You have access to the expected assortment of shot types, but it never feels great to play. Try as I might, it seemed impossible to hit any shot beyond the thirty-degree radius directly in front of you. Playing at the net also never seemed to work, with even flat shots from the opponent seemingly sailing over your head until they hit their bounce spot. Matches were still easy enough to win thanks to the AI opponents generally not being very good, but the tennis mechanics overall felt underwhelming.

Other sports fare even worse. Cricket, volleyball and soccer only pop up a couple of times each, largely relegated to small challenges from NPCs, and none of them are particularly deep. BMX racing appears a few times and is decent fun for a distraction but little more. Fishing is the other activity with the most going for it, tasking you with utilising different lines, lures, and attachments to snag the fish you need, but it’s isolated to just one section of the game. Unfortunately, there’s also no quickplay option for any of the sports outside of story mode, not even for golf. 

The variety on offer is appreciated, and the lack of depth for each activity is forgivable given their brief stints in the limelight, but the desire from the developers to include a bit of everything leaves all the bits that made it in feeling half-baked. There’s also a baffling decision in the game’s finale to have a round-robin sports event, but every activity is then just golf but with different balls. Why make me hit a volleyball with a golf club instead of letting me play volleyball? It’s almost as though they didn’t want to bring those other sports back for a final run. It’s a bloated feature list, and maybe there wasn’t enough development time to do justice to each sport. Adding just the tennis and maybe one more sport for this sequel and giving those the attention needed would have undoubtedly made for a better experience. 

A smaller feature list may have also helped iron out Sports Story’s biggest issue – bugs. I played the majority of this game on the version available at launch, and the following is a non-exhaustive list of issues I encountered during my time *deep breath*:

A golf ball soaring through the air and getting stuck on a bunker 80 feet below. Throwing a ball in a trash can and freezing the game. Walking out of bounds and across the blank void. Getting stuck on a patch of dirt and unable to move. Performance hitches during golf swings causing missed shots. Tennis points not scoring correctly. My RC car not appearing during a minigame. Somehow meeting the mission requirements when I hadn’t, and vice versa. Having a challenge automatically complete as soon as I started it. The on-screen wind indicator blatantly lying. My bike getting stuck and unable to move during a race. Being able to pick up infinite copies of a coupon item. The camera randomly zooming in when entering a new area. Multiple hard crashes. And most frustratingly, a mission sequence glitch that halted my progress at the tennis academy and left me unable to complete the game for about a week until the new patch dropped. 

Thankfully the aforementioned patch seems to have rectified the worst of the above, particularly the performance issues during golf swings, performance during exploration, and the progression bug, however, I can’t conclusively say that the other issues no longer occur at all, and I still had at least one hard crash post-patch. I recognise this is a game made by a small team, but it launched in an unfinished state that undeniably hampered my enjoyment of the game. 

This review likely comes across as harsh, and that’s due to having such high hopes after being such a big fan of the original. The golf is the same or arguably weaker than Golf Story. Tennis is mediocre and the other sports are shallow. There are too many fetch quests, and bugs and glitches plague it throughout.

But….

…I still had a good time!

It’s a game that is greater than the sum of its wobbly parts. It’s a charming, satisfying little adventure game with enough going for it minute to minute to make it enjoyable, and the weak spots are fleeting enough to not entirely dampen the experience. It looks wonderful and vibrant (some questionable interface changes aside), has a bopping soundtrack, hilarious writing, solid golfing, and a wide variety of challenges. There’s enough here for me to offer a cautious recommendation for those willing to forgive its flaws, perhaps with the caveat that it may be worth waiting for one more patch to iron out the last of the kinks. 

Rating: 3.5/5