To start this review with something very personal: My father passed away last week. It’s been difficult, to put it mildly. The reason I bring it up is that Dad absolutely loved Ten-Pin Bowling. Had his own ball, ball bag (I had no idea they made bowling ball bags), shoes, the works. He competed in social leagues all over the place. He was good, too. His highest score was somewhere around 250. Playing PBA Pro Bowling 2026 over this time has been cathartic, in a very surreal way (but then everything seems surreal right now).
I went Ten-Pin Bowling with Dad’s bowling buddies, and it was the first time I’ve played physical Ten-Pin Bowling for several years now. One of the consequences of my main sport, Dancesport, is that is screws with your knees, and that makes Ten-Pin Bowling a painful sport. I was never as good at it as Dad and typically bowl at around 150, but I do know my way around the bowling ball and I’ve got to say up-front that FarSight’s commitment to authenticity in this year’s PBA release is a significant jump on previous editions.
The physics of the ball and the way you curl it into the pins for strikes and spares feels good. The developers have even modelled differences in polish on the alley, which subtly affects how you need to approach your bowling. Left-handers and right-handers do need to play differently, as it’s difficult to curve the ball in different directions. There are also novelty versions of bowling for people who want to take a break from standing bowling.
There is a wide range of alleys to choose between, and a full roster of professionals. As I don’t follow professional Ten-Pin Bowling, I have no idea who any of these people are, but I can appreciate that there is a moderate level of detail that has gone into them. During the bowling itself, the game generally looks excellent, with each location having its own ambience, but during cut scenes, I do have to say that the animations of bowlers celebrating or expressing disappointment are stiff and limited. The crowds also look bad. Ten-Pin Bowling competitions don’t attract large numbers of people, and scaffolding at any given venue only supports a couple of rows of people, so the low level of detail in each of them is much more noticeable than in, say, a football game with a stadium full of fans.
However, you were never going to buy a Ten-Pin Bowling simulation and expect the highest fidelity visuals. It’s a niche sport, and that means it’s produced on a thin budget. What you’re looking for is gameplay that properly captures the challenge of the sport, and PBA Pro Bowling does that. Subtle nuances in the various systems that go into throwing the ball mean that you’re not guaranteed a strike every time just for setting the ball up on the same angle each time. At the same time, once you do develop consistency and experience, you will see that your score starts to climb as you become better at adjusting for those same nuances. Getting a score over 200 feels almost as rewarding in PBA Pro Bowling as it does in real life, and that’s no mean feat.
… Except that you won’t get bragging rights, because there’s no online multiplayer. PBA Pro Bowling 2026 on other platforms does have online (for one-on-one competition), but on the Switch, it’s a strictly solo and local multiplayer experience. This is a horrendous decision by FarSight given that Ten-Pin Bowling is a fundamentally social sport and the fun is in the capacity for people to make mistakes (and the ability to subsequently laugh at them). Here, you can pick AI opponents and set their difficulty, which will set the score range that they’ll get, but that’s it. All they’ll do is give you a target. No banter, no howling gutter balls. Just a scoreboard with artificial scores ticking over.
FarSight have worked hard to make the career mode as enjoyable as possible, with a lengthy progression system as well as plenty of minigames and quirky challenges that will really test your ability to play the angles and spin the ball in. It does work and would be a generally good practice mode for fully learning the game’s systems. Unfortunately, there’s not much more to the game than that career mode, so what really should be an extended tutorial before wading into play against humans is also the finishing point of this particular game.
PBA Pro Bowling 2026 on the Nintendo Switch has an extremely short lifespan, thanks to the lack of multiplayer and just one meaningful single-player mode. The development team really have done a good job of capturing the sport, and it’s a substantial improvement on FarSight’s previous efforts, which were both dry and not quite nuanced enough to do the sport justice. This gets that right, but just imagine going to the bowling alley to play a game by yourself. It’s not half the experience without friends around, and that applies to both the real sport and the digital adaptation.
