Mario Tennis Fever Review – Fast, Furious, and Packed With Glorious Chaos

Mario Tennis Fever Review

Mario sports games always have a gimmick, and it’s awesome. More sports games need a cool new mechanic that makes the sport twice as cool and couldn’t possibly exist. Mario Tennis Fever brings rackets with elemental powers to a version of the sport that’s already way more intense than usual. When you’re in that high-powered tennis groove, this game is unstoppable. It’s just all the little bits around the edges that can’t keep that same momentum.

Adventure mode is a campaign featuring a thin, crumbling premise. Mario and a handful of his buddies have been turned into babies, you see. They need to get really good at tennis, so those same skills can defeat a squad of monsters. You know, so they can become adult men again. This all sounds hilarious and cool, but in practice you’re walking back and forth across a massive campus doing training drills. You do get better at the game, so it’s not a total wash. But oh man, the pacing of this section suffers terribly.

Conversely, the other sections, where you’re just playing tennis in various ways, are a cavalcade of joyous psychosis. They go crazy with the tennis, in other words. The controls are snappy, the visuals are incredibly crisp, the fever rackets are awesome, and the special courts are great. More or less every mode beyond the campaign is endlessly compelling. The Trial Towers have you using your head, while normal matches are all about aggressive precision. Mario Tennis Fever presents a more violent version of tennis in general, and the fever rackets really elevate this concept to a new level. Tennis needed more fireballs and lightning, it turns out.

Players have hit points, and there are tangible consequences for losing all your HP. This means you’re motivated to fill your opponent’s half of the court with fever racket detritus at all times. So a good high level match is a minefield of obstacles. There’s a ton of rackets, and each one is worth checking out at least once. Some change the traction of the court, some obscure your vision, and most others just chip away at your health. The banana racket is especially insidious. Not only does it lay down peels wherever the special shot lands, but it’s much harder to prevent said peels from landing.

When you’re not laying down a field of death, you’ve got a grip of different shots to master. Slices, lobs, and straight shots all take practice and perfected reflexes to figure out. But the act of perfecting shots looks, in practice, like more incredible chaos on the court. Star shots and charged shots add an equal measure of insanity to every match. The devs have done everything in their power to keep every tennis match feeling deliciously intense.

Because this is a Switch 2 game, Fever has to include a motion controls mode. Unfortunately, it’s pretty limited in execution. You’re just playing singles or doubles matches using custom sets of rules and rackets. There’s a surprising amount of settings to tweak, which is nice. But it feels like a walled garden of sorts. You can’t port this unique control scheme over to the rest of the game. I found playing with a single Joy-Con clumsy at first, but I acclimated quickly enough. It’s a great party-style diversion, if you’re looking for such a thing.

While there’s an Adventure mode, the bulk of my playtime was spent unlocking rackets, courses, and characters. It’s a more fun and fast-paced progression system than anything offered by the training camp plotline. On the other hand, I can’t totally discount the Adventure mode. Though I could only handle it in small doses, I did learn a lot about the various shots that regular play didn’t teach me. Certain things, like that overhand lob, required a shocking amount of practice to master. I just wish the campaign didn’t involve so much pointless wandering back and forth. You learn a technique at one end, then go on a long walk to the opposite end to put said technique to use. Then you repeat this process over and over again until the campaign is more or less finished.

Even though some of the peripheral bits were less polished, the core gameplay in Fever is red hot. Actually playing a match of Tennis in this game is downright excellent. The regular matches are excellent, the tournaments are intense, and the special matches are all awesome. If you’re looking to change things up, the Trial Towers and the score challenges add a stack of fascinating twists to the standard tennis systems. Although I didn’t really vibe with the campaign mode, I still recognize its usefulness. I also wish those motion controls could be used in every other part of the game. If you want a more aggressive, fast-paced tennis game that’s also colorful, cute, and accessible, Mario Tennis Fever is an excellent choice.

***A Nintendo Switch 2 code was provided by the publisher***