While tennis fever won’t sweep across the UK until the strawberries are ripe and the hills have sprouted Henmans, Aussies would tell you that the tennis season is well underway. And so would Nintendo, with Mario Tennis Fever set to launch for Nintendo Switch 2 in just a couple weeks.
Mario Tennis Fever arrives in what, to my mind at least, is the strange scenario of its direct predecessor still being eminently playable on the Switch 2. I’m sure you can imagine how I felt when I was reminded that Mario Tennis Aces actually came out in 2018? It’s been eight years? When did that happen? Perhaps the curious memory hole that Aces found itself in isn’t helped by, well, this fundamentally still being a tennis game… with Mario and crazy super-powers.
Our hands-on time started with a brief tutorial, running through the core controls and new Fever Rackets. It’s immediately very familiar, with your standard shot types spread across the four face buttons, the ability to pull of a strong double-tap Powerful Shot, and the held Charge Shot. Positioning is important, but this is a thoroughly forgiving game in terms of shot timing. If you or your opponent misstime things, then a Star Shot smash opportunity is highlighted on the court for you to race to and try to take advantage of.
Where Mario Tennis Fever starts to distinguish itself from Aces is with the much larger roster of characters to play as – introducing Baby Waluigi for the very first time alongside the lesser seen Baby Wario – each with particular stats and attributes, and that your Special Shot is now determined by which racket they are holding. Fever Rackets can do all manner of things, from leaving burning chunks of rock on the court to whipping up localised tornadoes, summoning shadowy allies, and more. The trick to the Fever Rackets is that these can be returned with good positioning and timing, bouncing their ill effects back to the other side of the court.
With the basics mastered, we hopped into multiplayer for 1v1 and 2v2 matches, and I had a great time of it. There’s a great arcade foundation for this game, and I loved being able to send truly wicked slices that swerved off the court, while the quick double-tap Powerful Shot was my mainstay for a rally.
But things got silly as we started to lean on the Fever Racket shots, with this meter building up much more quickly than in Mario Tennis Aces. While I only really got to explore a handful of the effects the rackets offered, the way that some of the effects would stick around between points made them very powerful. Being able to lock off certain parts of the court with burning coals, or purposefully aiming for twisters to try and send the ball in befuddling directions, and having these affect multiple points was a huge advantage. The Mud Racket, though, is massively overpowered. This creates pools of mud that splatter the screen like the squid ink from Mario Kart… but it will do it every time the ball splats into a muddy patch! At the very least, you need to try and return this to the other side of the net to try and share some of the pain, but it feels like a very powerful racket, so long as you don’t suffer the backsplash.
Running into damaging hazards will also drain a player’s HP, and getting hit by too much damage will knock them out of the match for a few moments. It was particularly tense when this happened in doubles, as I frantically tried to hold out until my partner was able to (miraculously) rejoin and hit the winner from the net.
Things already get pretty chaotic when there’s four players, all with distinct racket abilities, but what if you threw even more modifiers into the mix? The Mix It Up mode adds further special rules and special courts. The Racket Factory spawns new rackets for you to grab if you hit a quadrant on the other side of the court, and there’s also Ring Shot, Pinball and a tricky-looking Forest Court which grows and shrinks over time.
Perhaps the wildest of the bunch is the Wonder Court Match. Inspired by Super Mario Bros. Wonder, it tasks you with collecting Wonder Seeds that float above the net with your directed shots, but halfway through the match, a Wonder Flower will appear and bring a grand transformation to the court. We’ve seen the net turn into a set of green pipes that can move up and down, while another has Piranha Plants walking back and forth like it’s the Mushroom Kingdom Fashion Week or something. You still need to keep grabbing Wonder Seeds in order to win.
Mario Tennis Fever has plenty in common with Mario Tennis Aces, but the focus has shifted just a little to give it more of a party game vibe. The Zone Shot system of before felt like it was all about hitting a finisher for a single point, but as you direct a Fever Shot in this sequel, it’s more about injecting another wild variable and obstacle. If the adventure mode can be a bit more engaging this time around, this could be a really fun entry for all players.
