Mario Tennis Fever

(available on Nintendo Switch 2 only)

Mario Tennis Fever is the latest in the Mario Sports spin-off series and part of the marketing for Mario’s 40th anniversary; it’s coming at a time that really isn’t optimal. Granted, Mario Tennis Aces did well on the Switch, but Golf and Strikers were not received well and were largely criticised for their lack of content at launch, among many other issues like a lacking single player.

Mario Tennis Fever tries to shake things up with a new Fever Racket system, where you get a new superpower when you power up the meter which can affect the game. For example, the Shadow Racket creates a duplicate of yourself, the volcano racket creates a lava plume that will affect the opponent’s side, the Mud Racket can slow opponents down if they walk on certain areas of the court, so on and so forth. You have to be careful, because it is a risk and reward system, your opponents can hit the effect back at you if the reward doesn’t successfully bounce.

The game also touts an adventure mode, which revolves around Daisy getting sick and the team looking for a Golden Apple to cure her, somehow turn into their baby forms, and attend tennis academy. I’ll go more into my thoughts on that later into the review.

That being said, there isn’t too much to this game. It’s a tennis game starring Mario characters and it does what it says on the tin, but how does this sports game turn out?

PROS

• Multiplayer

Obviously, a Mario sports game needs a strong multiplayer. That is very apparent here. I’d say for the most part that that is strong. I’ll go into Special Mode in a bit more detail later, but the basic tennis is genuinely enjoyable, especially when you play with good friends online or in person. In fact, I did several online matches for this review, and not only can I say the connection was stable, but it ran very well and there were very little frame rate drops. The fever racket system does a very good job in affecting the gameplay, especially considering that you now have a health meter, which when you reach 0, it slows you down significantly and in doubles matches it can force the game into a 2 v 1 situation.

The game does have several rackets with different abilities, and you should try them all out to see which one suits your style of play the best but bear in mind that doubles matches can get very chaotic with several powers on the field at once.

The game controls very well, I have very little against the control scheme, it essentially comes down to different buttons being assigned to different types of shots, and this isn’t a button-mashing game, you do have to apply a bit of strategy to succeed, but not as much that younger players won’t be able to pick it up.

• Visuals

Now this is a Switch 2 exclusive, and I’m not surprised at how good it looks. Granted, this isn’t one of the best-looking games on Switch 2, but it is very visually strong. It also helps that all the court designs are individually strong. You get some typical tennis courts and some versions of the courts from the story mode, but you also get callbacks to other Mario games so you can see Waluigi’s Pinball and the Airship from Mario 3, and a whole tennis court from Mario 1 is here too!

It is a strong entry, but I personally believe while I think there’s better things to come for Switch 2, it’s definitely one of the more visually striking games that we have right now.

• Special Modes

The game does offer different modes. There’s a Tower Mode which is like a challenge mode, I didn’t do too much of it, but it at least provides a bit of extra content. There are also some single player tournaments, but I have to say because the AI is a bit too forgiving for single players, I didn’t play too many of these either.

The special modes are definitely the standouts; they provide lots of great content. Some of them aren’t amazing and do require multiplayer to be fun, I’m thinking of Ring Mode particularly here, but there are five modes in total, and they are all strong in their own way.

I think the most notable for me was Waluigi Pinball which could really go insane with the additional Pinball physics which definitely added to the chaotic run. Ring Shot is fine, it’s basically a game where getting your ball through rings gets you more points, Rocket Factory is alright but it’s basically a randomiser for the special Fever Rackets.

The standout for me was the Wonder Court Match, which was based on Mario Wonder. It involves being the first to collect seven Wonder Seeds, which then triggers an effect that changes part of the gameplay, and can turn the match into chaotic fun. Honestly, it was incredibly fun to play.

• Character Selection

The biggest complaint that a lot of Mario Sports games have had is that they were simply lacking in content that wasn’t made up until later. Mario Tennis Fever launches with 38 characters. Granted, you don’t get them all immediately and you have to unlock a large majority of them, but you get them all relatively quickly and none of them are locked behind Adventure Mode. Some people are going to be disappointed with some of the characters that didn’t make it into the game, but it still has a decent variety of characters.

MIXED

• Online Multiplayer

I did praise the fact that the online multiplayer does function well, and has very few frame rate drops, and I have no issues with the ranked match system. I didn’t win that many, but I had a good go. The most fun I had was doing the online lobby matches with my friends, but there’s a few issues: if you have a large group of people and you want to do several kinds of matches, you’re going to need multiple rooms. It’s four people per room if you’re doing doubles, and two people if you’re doing singles. If you want to change the rules or the amount of people you have in your room, you have to close the room and start another one. This also goes if you want to do special modes as well, this also requires you to close down the lobby and reset it. It’s not the worst thing in the world, but it did make some online sessions a bit more difficult.

CONS

• Adventure Mode

I don’t understand how the developers of these games keep getting so close with good ideas for single player content in the sports games but then don’t go the full way with it.

The plot line is bad, and it’s similar to the recent Mario Golf’s Adventure mode, where it’s trying to replicate the old Gameboy Colour RPG games, it was basically those elements that Golf Story and Sports Story were trying to emulate. Those games are worth your time, and you can play them on the Gameboy app which comes with your online subscription.

The problem with these games is that it doesn’t work. I will say that it’s not as bad as Mario Golf’s Adventure mode which felt like a complete waste of time, but it does have a lot of the same issues, mainly the fact that it’s rather aimless in its ideas and it’s quite restrictive. Your stats will only go up as much as that part of the story wants them to go up, so it’s incredibly linear in that way, and this isn’t helped by the fact that this is essentially like Mario Golf, a tutorial with a story attached to it. I found it very dull. Once again, another sports game that fails to impress with its single player content.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Mario Tennis Fever is a strong multiplayer experience with a weak single player outing. The game plays well in docked and handheld mode, I enjoyed the gameplay and overall, it has a good frame rate and visuals, with some good gameplay to back it up when you’re doing multiplayer. However, I also think that playing with random people isn’t as fun as playing it with your friends, and I really enjoyed my time with the game but I’m not sure how much it will hold my attention in a few months’ time. That being said, I do think that this is worth a purchase at the time, because if you wait for a sale, you may get it when not many people are still playing multiplayer.

FINAL SCORE 7.5/10