Nickelodeon Extreme Tennis: Next! Review – Swing And A Miss

Nickelodeon Extreme Tennis: Next! Review

Tennis is not normally an extreme sport. So calling your game Nickelodeon Extreme Tennis: Next! is a pretty bold move. In theory, this game has all the needed ingredients to make tennis into a high-stakes explosion with every match. Wacky characters, impossible power-ups, and incredible special moves all feel pretty extreme, no? And yet, somehow this version of Extreme Tennis felt a bit dull. Whether it’s the pace, the presentation, or the mechanics, something about this tennis game falls short.

If nothing else, Extreme Tennis is crammed with content. Every character has a set of story missions to complete, and there are over a dozen of these mission sets to complete right from the jump. Each match comes with special requirements that earn you stars. Collecting every star for a character’s mission set earns you alternate outfits. Sounds great, right? There’s so much to do! Even so, I found myself quickly getting bored. Perhaps it’s a personal failing. Maybe I can only play so much tennis before my eyes start to cross.

So Many Stages

Or maybe the story missions all start blending together after a short while. Everyone looks distinct, but they all feel similar during their matches. You build up your special meter, changing up your shots so your opponents can’t take you out. Stars are always earned by winning the match, doing a certain basic move, or using the power-ups available. If not for the different models and their handful of voice lines, you’d have no idea which character you were actually using.

There’s also no shortage of challenges to overcome. Tournaments get tougher the further you go. Story missions also slowly escalate in difficulty. It’s an effective salve against boredom, although difficulty is often measured by how often your opponent gets in their special move. Eventually you’re just trading these unblockable attacks back and forth. Whoever times their respective move right, or figures out how to block the cursed things, wins the match.

The Rocky Road To Victory

Like any good tennis game, Extreme Tennis has a bunch of moves to master. You’ve got your four basic strikes, a dash, and an ultimate. You can change where a shot ends up, and proper timing produces perfect hits. And yet somehow, matches still started blending into another. Perhaps the difficulty curve is too weird and jagged. You go from never needing these fancy moves, to getting rinsed no matter what you try. Well, unless what you tried was the match in question, for a second or third time. Then you’ll almost certainly succeed. Again, the difficulty curve isn’t ‘steep’ so much as it’s ‘weird.’

The controls are responsive, you’ve got a bunch of characters, and the visuals are clean and bright. The various game modes mean that you’ve got tons of tennis to play, if you’re so inclined. All of the ingredients are in place for this to be an excellent tennis game. And yet it’s absolutely not one, not by the most important metric. I was crushingly bored, almost immediately. It’s a persistent sensation that stubbornly defies description.

That Missing Piece

In the end, no matter what kind of high-quality ingredients you might be working with, the gameplay loop is more or less all that matters. Extreme Tennis has a bunch of colorful characters, tons of matches, and a stack of ultimate moves. But without enough variety in the moment, these things fall pretty flat. If you feed all these bright and bubbly trinkets into the same grain thresher that is the gameplay, they all come out equally shredded and pulped. Having so much content available for players shouldn’t feel like a threat, and yet it does. The idea of playing through all five stages for the entire roster of Nickelodeon characters filled me with quivering dread. But maybe I’m not the audience being targeted here. If you’re looking for a casual sports game crammed to the ceiling with familiar faces, you’re in luck! Nickelodeon Extreme Tennis: Next! is a pure tennis experience that performs its duty admirably. It just couldn’t get its hooks in me somehow.

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