Instant Sports

Genre: Compilation / Sports (Various)

Players: 1-8 Competitive / Team Competitive (Local / Local Split-Screen)

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Review:

Instant Sports is a family-friendly Compilation of various Sports games (well, mostly minigames) released on Nintendo Switch in 2019. With most of these minigames making use of gyroscopic motion control in some form, this is a game that is clearly aiming to be a replacement for Wii Sports on the Nintendo Switch.

Here’s what I thought of each of the games in this collection:

Game	Genre	# of Players	Grade
Run ‘N Jump	Sports (Hurdle Race)	1-4 Competitive (Local Splitscreen)	F
tl;dr This game’s motion controls don’t seem to be working properly, and even if they did this would be a pretty shallow game.
Tennis	Sports (Tennis)	1-2 Competitive (Local Splitscreen)	D+
tl;dr Players have no agency over their movement, and must either use gimmicky motion controls or awkward gamepad controls. There’s also a lack of nuance to the kinds of shots players can make. A young child might enjoy this game in easy mode, but otherwise this is a terrible Tennis game.
Rafting	Arcade	1-2 Competitive (Local Splitscreen)	C
tl;dr Players use motion control to steer a raft. This mode is actually pretty fun, but it’s extremely shallow and won’t entertain players long before they decide to move on.
Goal Keeper	Arcade	2-4 Competitive (Local Splitscreen)	C+
tl;dr Players use motion control to move a pointer to intercept balls as they rush toward a soccer goal, as well as power-ups. This is a fun minigame, but again, a shallow one.
Bowling	Arcade	1-8 Competitive (Local Alternating)	B-
tl;dr This is a pretty good facsimile of Wii Sports Bowling, with good use of motion control. The game unfortunately lacks the ability to angle your player, but as a bonus there is a variant of the game that has players bowling around obstacles. Overall, this is one of the highlights of this compilation.
Baseball	Arcade	1-4 Competitive (Local Alternating)	D-
tl;dr This isn’t baseball, it’s a simply “press the button at the right time” minigame disguised as baseball… except the “button” is gimmicky motion control.

So what you have here is all over the place. On the one hand, you have a pretty solid Bowling game, albeit one without some options that would have been nice to include. The Rafting and Goal Keeper games are pretty fun too, but seem shallow enough that they’re more like minigames. Tennis clearly had some effort put into it, but it’s ultimately a failed experiment. Run ‘N Jump seems to attempt to do something interesting with motion controls but fails miserably. And Baseball, while technically playable, is lazy and cynical and sure to disappoint. So on balance, one worthwhile game out of six, with two that are at least decent time-wasters.

At the very least, the presentation here is mostly pretty good, with colorful cartoony graphics, simple characters, and some nice-looking environments… though you can definitely see plenty of flaws if you look close enough, like a few framerate hitches, water painted onto the background in the opening of the Rafting game, and laughably bad animation in the crowds in the Run ‘N Jump game. Overall, this still looks pretty good, but it seems like the visuals do cut some corners. This is paired with an energetic soundtrack that works well enough for the game, but isn’t particularly memorable.

Overall, I can’t say that Instant Sports quite succeeds at replacing Wii Sports. At its best (Bowling), it succeeds fairly well, but most of the content here fails to rise to that level. If all players really want is a replacement for Wii Sports Bowling and maybe a few extra minigames that will provide a fun distraction, Instant Sports should do the trick. But players hoping for a balanced selection of Sports games will not find it here.

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tl;dr – Instant Sports is a family-friendly Compilation of various motion-controlled Sports games that aims to be a replacement for Wii Sports on Nintendo Switch. The bowling game here manages this fairly well, but everything else ranges from fun but shallow to poorly-conceived to outright lazy. Certainly a few of the games here are worth playing, but this is a highly-unbalanced package that just doesn’t measure up to its inspiration.

Grade: C

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