Review: Mario Tennis Fever
There have been many Mario sports games over the years, and taken collectively they’re a mixed bag. He’s a strong golfer and his soccer attempts can be fun; he’s less exciting on the basketball court, and many of his other pursuits (including his Olympic dreams alongside Sonic the Hedgehog) have seemingly been abandoned. When it comes to tennis, Mario’s been harder to predict. The games in the Mario Tennis series have alternated between being brilliant and uneven, either not offering many play options or relying too much on chance or unbalanced power-ups.
Thankfully, Mario Tennis Fever is one of the good ones – in fact, taken purely on the strength of its on-court action, it’s probably the best Mario Tennis game there’s ever been. While there’s some shortcomings in the suite of options available, if you want good, frantic tennis, this game’s got it.
When you start up Mario Tennis Fever, you’re immediately presented with many different ways to play. There’s a single-player story mode, a motion-control option, tournaments to enter and conquer, and a few different modes that let you play with altered, heightened rulesets. I found that every time I started the game up, I was pulled in a different direction – first to the story mode, then off to the sides to explore everything else the game has to offer – and most of what’s here is solid.
The single-player story mode, unfortunately, is the worst part of the package, a brief jaunt through a series of tutorials, mini-games and matches that ultimately feels more like a training ground than a serious drawcard. It’s nice to have a story mode at all, of course, but it doesn’t really rate much discussion.
Thankfully, other single-player modes are far better, as they focus on the game’s core strength – how good the tennis feels. Novelties like ring shot mode – where you try to hit the ball through rings over the net to rack up points – or swing mode, where you play by swinging a Joy Con like a tennis racket, are enjoyable and plentiful. I also appreciated the purity of being able to enter into tournaments, either in singles or as a doubles pair. As fun as a lot of the different modes in Mario Tennis Fever are, the game is at its best when it’s just characters whacking the ball back and forth.
There are six basic shot types in Mario Tennis Fever, and learning how and when to use each one is the key to success. In past Mario Tennis games, forcing your opponent to the back of the court and then tricking them with a short drop shot was very effective – and while it still can be here too, I found myself needing to be more adaptable here. There are many ways to lure your opponent into a trap, or to be trapped yourself, and the tennis matches feel more like mindgames than in previous entries. If you’re playing with Fever Rackets – which grant your character a special ability – there’s an extra element of strategy involved, as you lob Mario Kart-esque attacks back and forth. The more I have played, the more I’ve come to appreciate the accessibility of Mario Tennis Fever‘s technical, clever approach to the sport.
Ultimately, as solid as the single-player content is, the main attraction is playing the game online against strangers, or with other people in the room with you. It’s against human opponents where the game really shines, and where the battle-of-wits element of the tennis game comes to the fore. I’ll likely keep coming back to Mario Tennis Fever and dabbling in its single-player modes, but playing against other people is where the game’s intricacies really come to the fore. It’s easy enough to learn that a new player can sneak the ball past a pro occasionally, but mastery will be an ongoing process.
The online offering is thin, but entertaining. When you jump into online lobbies, there are four options: playing with or without Fever Rackets, which give you access to game-changing powers, and in either a singles or doubles set-up. You’re ranked individually in each discipline, and while if you’re anything like me the first hour online is going to involve a lot of losing until you sink down to the rank you belong at, once you get there, and you start facing opponents of a similar skill level, it’s quite exciting. I found that, across many matches, I saw a lot of different strategies and patterns – and, as with most sports, if you can figure out your opponent’s core strategy, you can also figure out how to play against it. Even an opponent defeating you can be exciting when you can see that they’ve identified your own patterns and figured out how to counter them.
Mario Tennis Fever is a Switch 2 exclusive, and while it certainly looks great and runs well, it doesn’t necessarily feel like an enormous technical leap from 2018’s Mario Tennis Aces on the Nintendo Switch. It is, however, a better game of tennis, with a stronger suite of modes and the best ball physics in the series. The Mario Tennis series has had its ups and downs, but with Fever, it’s firmly back.
Mario Tennis Fever is available now on Nintendo Switch 2. A review copy was provided by the publisher.
James O’Connor has been writing about games since 2008. He is the author of Untitled Goose Game for Boss Fight Books.
