The only real downside to the one-on-one play: when both players are practiced and highly skilled, the duel portion tends to end in a draw since it's a timed event. And you can't just block willy-nilly, either: a vertical block can be bypassed with a vertical strike, so it's important to read how your opponent is holding his sword in the defensive position.
The game not only encourages defensive play but almost requires it: if a striking player hits your sword in defense it'll open him up for attack. I wholly disagree, and I actually commend Nintendo for putting a good amount of strategy into such a simple design. I've seen some reviews that claim that there's very little depth in this mode and, like many Wii classic motion games, the strategy of random waggle seems to work best. Swordplay starts out with a basic "American Gladiators" one-on-one design against a human or computer opponent where the task is to simply whack the other character off the platform into the drink. The star of the show is easily Swordplay, a game that will no doubt inspire LucasArts to give us the Star Wars lightsaber game that Wii owners have so desperately craved since the Wii's inception. Watch the video review of Wii Sports Resort.
Granted two – Bowling and Golf – are Wii Sports repeats that have been enhanced with Wii Motion Plus capabilities, but the rest are new and a majority of the games are really solid Wii remote game designs that, for the most part, couldn't have been done without the Wii Motion Plus attachment. It's also fantastic that Nintendo bulked up the load of sports for its sequel: five wouldn't have cut it for the follow-up. I'm certainly not complaining about this direction: the basic design is really the reason why so many people have played and still play the original game. Nintendo didn't go far beyond the original's presentation or visual style – it's just as simple and pick-up-and-play to appease that same non-hardcore crowd. Wii Sports Resort is, at its core, a very good tech demo of the capabilities of Wii Motion Plus in a package that will appeal to the same exact people that love the original Wii Sports. It makes all the sense in the world for Nintendo to debut this peripheral in a sequel to its most popular game, Wii Sports Resort. In the background, Nintendo's research and development team tooled away on a future accessory called the Wii Motion Plus, a device that plugs into the bottom of a Wii Remote and recognizes motion far more accurately than the standard controller does, offering developers the opportunity to create games that feature incredibly sensitive motion control and not just mindless waggle. Just play Wii Sports boxing and you can see all the problems bubble to the surface. Wii Sports also showed off the remote's motion limitations: the five sports games demonstrated that even with the built-in accelerometers the Wii remote wasn't as versatile as Nintendo may have advertised.