What is Sports Story?
Sports Story is an isometric top-down pixel art RPG developed by Sidebar Games available on the Nintendo Switch. It was released in December, 2022 and costs $15. In this game you role-play as an athlete on a fictional island sports utopia where you play through a story in a number of different environments, playing numerous sports, to try to become a professional golfer. It is the follow-up game to Golf Story and takes around 15 hours to complete the mainline story.
Game Review:
The announcement for Sports Story intrigued me and I decided to try it out, even though I never played the original game Golf Story. I had heard many good things about Golf Story from other reviewers and podcasts that I listen to but the game only being about Golf didn’t pique my interest too much. Sports Story introducing a number of other sports grabbed my attention because, as a PE teacher by trade, I love many different sports. And as someone who loves storytelling I thought this would be a great game, especially as a game that might be able to break through and give some depth to the sports genre. I could not have been more wrong.
Firstly, the story in Sports Story is a jumbled mess. You’re some athlete invited to the island to play for the sports company PureStrike, but you aren’t yet a professional. It just drops you in this world and doesn’t give you much of an introduction. To earn your way to becoming a professional you go to a number of different areas of the island that focus on specific sports and perform strange tasks that aren’t sports related except you use sports to solve them. Some of the problems include removing these mob guys from a golf course and finding the deed to the course, restoring power to an underground city, and finding a way to stop the rain in a fishing town. The tasks all feel out of place and there’s not really any justification for why things are the way they are. And some things that happen, even at the end of the story line just occur out of the blue and are never explained or brought up again.
The dialogue in the game often falls flat. The developers attempted humor all throughout the game but it never landed for me. It doesn’t help when the text reads out super slowly and there’s no way to speed it up. They could be trying to control the timing which is key in humor but the humor was too weak for timing to help much. Honestly I haven’t even finished the last chapter of the game, the story wasn’t worth continuing, especially with the gameplay issues I’ll discuss next.
Gameplay in this game revolves around playing some very surface level versions of a variety of sports and a bunch of fetch quests and light puzzles throughout the world. The sports that are represented in this game are golf, soccer, tennis, cricket, baseball, RC cars, BMX, fishing, and volleyball. Most of these sports are “mini-game at the arcade” versions of each sport with the exception of Golf. I didn’t enjoy most of these sports and some of them were barely present in the game, only available for a quick minigame or two. Golf was the only sport fleshed out enough to be fun and enjoyable, and that’s because they could copy over the mechanics from their previous game, Golf Story. Tennis was okay to play but it felt really stiff to try to move your character and hit the ball. I ended up missing tons of shots just because I couldn’t move and hit at the same time. All the other sports were barely present, very surface level, and not very fun.
This game also suffers from a variety of performance issues. I am not a stickler for things like this usually but I had things key to a quest disappear from the screen and had to reload to continue. The framerate is all over the place. There are also issues with just how the game is designed - mistakes that were missed by the developers. In the game, items you can interact with give you prompts to interact with them, in a few quests the prompt just never appeared for me and I had to google the answer to the quest because I was stuck and got frustrated. The game felt rushed out to try to make it before Christmas but it looks like it could’ve used some more time in the oven.
Family Friendliness:
Sports Story is a family friendly game. Dialogue is all very kid appropriate and the art style can be inviting to a kid to watch or play. Sports are fun family friendly activities and the story might be intriguing and funny to a small child.
Features for Parents:
Sports Story is a text based game so you won’t miss the story if you play while the kiddo is napping. There’s also a good pause feature and the checkpointing system for saving is well done. Sports Story also features a 4 player golf course mode that lets you play locally. It could be fun to play the best sport in the game with your kids if they’re old enough to play games.
Final Verdict:
Sports Story is not a good game in its current state. The developers could go in and update the game to make it run better which would help. But the story and barebones versions of the sports leave it incredibly boring and bland. The game never reached a level that a sports-lover like myself could enjoy. This game was a big disappointment for me and is not a game I recommend.