Sidebar Games’ Sports Story, the long-awaited sequel to the breakout Nintendo Switch hit Golf Story, fails to replicate the charm of its predecessor, arriving as a buggy, unfocused experience that struggles to justify its own ambition.
The Golfing Foundation Remains Solid
As the title implies, the game expands its scope beyond the fairway to include a variety of other athletic pursuits. Golf remains the core pillar, and for good reason; the mechanics of selecting clubs, gauging wind direction, and mastering the three-click swing meter across eight courses still provide the satisfying gameplay loop that made the original such a success. When the game focuses on golf, it captures a glimpse of the brilliance that fans expected. Unfortunately, these moments of clarity are consistently overshadowed by poorly implemented secondary sports and a bloated narrative.
A Scattered Roster of Sports
The addition of BMX, tennis, cricket, volleyball, fishing, running, and baseball creates a cluttered experience rather than a diverse one. Tennis, which demands significant playtime, suffers from overly precise hitboxes and inconsistent physics that often award points to opponents despite clear player success. Other activities, such as BMX, oscillate between entertaining time trials and frustratingly difficult obstacle courses. Ultimately, these diversions only serve to highlight that the developer’s expertise is heavily skewed toward golf, making the constant forced participation in other sports feel like a chore.
Narrative Fatigue and Tedious Quests
Spanning over 20 hours, the narrative component of Sports Story is a significant step down from its predecessor. While Golf Story utilized humor and charm to build its world, this sequel relies on dialogue that is frequently unfunny and tedious. The game structure leans heavily into monotonous fetch-quests, forcing players to wander aimlessly in search of vague objectives or obscure character interactions. While the golf-themed dungeons offer occasional moments of puzzle-solving joy, they represent a frustratingly small fraction of the total experience.
Technical Failures and Lack of Polish
The game’s most glaring issue is its pervasive lack of technical stability. Frequent crashes to the Switch home screen often result in significant lost progress, while persistent frame rate drops and stuttering turn precision-based gameplay—such as the golf swing or tennis rallies—into a gamble. The laundry list of technical grievances is extensive: quests fail to trigger, dialogue boxes hang, and character clipping allows for unintended map navigation, such as levitating while fishing. Even if the game were free of these bugs, the core design remains a textbook example of ambition exceeding execution, leaving Sports Story as a hollow follow-up to a beloved original.
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