Best Sports GAMES For Switch

Almost as essential as platformers are to the Nintendo Ecosystem, first party sports titles have become equally integral. Although they don’t reach nearly the same sales levels as other first party titles, they do get critical acclaim and the definitely get cult status.

With so many different sports to choose from, there are sometimes long gaps in between releases. The Nintendo Switch featured plenty of first party sports titles and that’s not even including Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, which has now sold over 60 million.

As we are now counting down the days before the successor to the Switch gets released, let’s take a look at all the entries and figure out which Nintendo Switch Sports titles are worth your time.

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RANKING MARIO SPORTS Games on SWITCH

5th - Mario Golf: Super Rush

As a fan of the original Mario Golf back on the Nintendo 64 and a huge fan of the Hot Shots Golf series dating back to the original PlayStation, expectations were high when Nintendo brought back the series after a seven year hiatus, the first entry since world tour in 2014. Camelot, the team behind the original Hot Shots Golf in 1997 and every Mario Golf game since 99, were still leading development, but something just never felt right with Mario Golf: Super Rush.

The courses were generic and lacked proper commitment in either direction. They blended serious courses with Mario elements, which felt like a jack of all trades, master of none situation. The adventure mode felt tedious and uninspired and the big selling point, Super Rush or speed golf wasn’t that interesting. Most importantly, the core gameplay just never felt fun. The best thing about the Hot Shots series or the Mario Golf series was that it was simple on the surface, but could reward players for mastering the game. Special moves elevated the experience in both of these series, but in Super Rush, they could easily ruin a whole round. The line is ultra thin between adding in some exaggerated moves like power spin and by going too far by adding adding ground freezing. Instead of enhance, the special moves detracted from the experience.

4th - Mario Strikers: Battle League

In terms of presentation, Mario Strikers: Battle League is the best on this list, but that shouldnt come as a surprise as Next Level Games, the once independent studio that was acquired by Nintendo after Luigi’s Mansion 3, are the team behind Battle League. The biggest downside is right in the title: Battle League. Mario Strikers is targeted more towards the online player. Unlike Mario Tennis Aces, Mario Strikers is lacking a major single player component, which is too bad because the mechanics, style and presentation of this game are probably the best on the list.

The roster of Mario Strikers: Battle League is a little small and when you need 8 to take the field, it does create the feeling of repetition. When games like Mario Tennis Aces has 30, there is no reason that Battle League shouldn’t have had more characters.

As for the gameplay itself, its a 4v4 arcade soccer that is closer to Blitz than it is to FIFA, but there is a level of strategy in the game with items that can change the tide as well as super shots. It’s also a must to mention the comic style cutscenes when you finally manage to pull off a special move. It would have been amazing if each character had two cutscenes of the same move, as you see the same ones often, but even seeing the same ones is a lot of fun. If you prefer to play online or play locally with friends, Mario Strikers Battle League is a lot of fun.

3rd - Switch Sports

Switch Sports is a good game, but my biggest issue is that it could have been much better. It might be hard to believe, but Switch Sports could have given Wii Sports Resort a run for the money in the sales department. It was never going to compete with the nearly 83 million of Wii Sports, but that was bundled in with the Wii, but Wii Sports Resort sold 33 million.

Switch Sports currently has about 16 million in sales and that was with only launching with 6 sports. Two of these sports shouldnt really count either. Having Tennis and Badminton are redundant and Soccer didnt emulate the real experince without the leg strap. Putting on the leg strap also worked counter to the whole experience of Switch Sports and that it was so easy to pick up and play. It didnt require additional wires, sensors, or candles. All you needed was a couple joy-cons and wrist straps to protect your TV.

Switch Sports eventually added golf, which like the rest of the activities, played very well, but it just wasn’t enough to take Swtich Sports from a good game to a must buy. Wii Sports Resort launched with 12 sports and there was an absence of some of the series classics including baseball, archery, and boxing.

The addition of the sports mates were fine, and adding in cosmetics was a good reason to keep playing, but it would have been nice if these items weren’t limited time and were somehow also tied into single player progression instead of online. Meet the player where they want to be.

With a few more sports and a little more depth for the single player offline mode, Switch Sports could have been something truly special.

2nd - Ring Fit Adventure

Outside of the fact that Ring Fit Adventure seemed to enjoy a quarantine boost as it released in October of 2019, that shouldn't take anything away that this is another great entry in peripheral based Nintendo Sports titles. Not counting the Wii Sports series, I think Ring Fit Adventure is the best exercise centric Nintendo game ever.

Ring Fit Adventure was basically a combination of an RPG and Wii Fit, but a lot more fun and less of a nuisance to set up. For a while Ring Fit Adventure was nestled in the top ten best selling games on the Switch, but now just sits outside with over 15 million as of the end of the 2023 financial year.

About the only downside that I can think of with Ring Fit Adventure was that it didn’t overly stop you from selecting attacks or exercises that you are more comfortable with. Some enemies have weaknesses to certain attacks, and sometimes the exercises that do that most damage are some of the easier ones. It would have been nice if Ring Fit Adventure somehow accounted for exercises you have already done in each session as well. The other issue was that when you first start out you don’t have access to all the exercises and this leads to some leg heavy sessions at the start, which can feel a little repetitious. One of the keys to exercise is to push you outside of your comfort zone a little and trying to force you into a more balanced workout would have been a nice touch.

There are also stand alone modes if you don’t want to mix in RPG elements into your workout as well as mini games that help mix up your workouts.

1st - Mario Tennis Aces

Mario Tennis Aces has it all. It’s super quick to pick up and play. It has plenty of modes, including a fun single player adventure mode, local co-op, tournaments and online play. However, the most important thing about Mario Tennis Aces is that the gameplay features the perfect balance of easy to play, but hard to master. The best way to see which game is the best, is to strip away all of the bells and whistles to find out which game had the best core experience.

You can have lots of fun just hitting the ball back and forth with one button, but you can also master the slice, top spin, lob shot and then there is the special moves that add to the experience as opposed to take away from it. It’s hard to believe that Mario Tennis Aces was also developed by Camelot, who also did Mario Golf Super Rush, because so many of the the things they got right in this game were fumbled in Super Rush. The adventure mode was fun, there are plenty of characters to choose from and the special sauce elevated the core experience.

It should go without saying that a bad Nintendo Sports game is better than most. Trying to create a Nintendo Sports title poses a different challenge than traditional sports games where you upgrade some visuals, change some rosters and incorporate a few reality based features.

It’s a delicate balance of trying to create new gameplay features that can drastically shift the experience from one entry to the next, which is why the results can lead to somewhat disappointing or amazing results. These outcomes are also amplified by the long wait in between entries at times.