Mario Tennis Fever review – Nintendo's first Switch 2 sports spin-off isn't quite an outright smash

The Nintendo Switch 2 receives its first Mario sports game spin-off in the form of Mario Tennis Fever, a fun but flawed entry in the long-running series that often prioritises quantity over quality.

You have to feel for the developers over at Camelot Software. Always the bridesmaid, never the bride, it’s worked tirelessly over several decades to try and force the Mushroom Kingdom cast into all manner of different sports game spin-offs – and always to wildly varying degrees of success. Its latest comes in the form of Mario Tennis Fever, the debut sports spin-off exclusive on Nintendo Switch 2 that certainly makes excellent use of the new hardware’s extra ‘oomph’ in horsepower. Visually speaking, this is the best Super Mario and friends have ever looked while holding either a tennis racket or a golf club in their hands.

The core game itself plays just as well as it ever has, too, striking a solid (though not perfect) balance between a technical and more arcade style of play. Its new Fever Racket gimmick, however, is less successful and can even often outright break the game, which, when combined with an over-too-soon and simple Adventure mode, prevents Mario Tennis Fever from being the outright smash it should have been.

Starting off with the good, and there’s simply a lot of creativity and invention on display in Mario Tennis Fever as soon as you load it up. In addition to the ability to play straight one-on-one and doubles matches across a decent mix of court surface types, Fever doesn’t skimp out and offers up an immense gauntlet of unique modes to jump into.

From the Mortal Kombat-esque Trial Tower mode that has you battling your way up through various, oddly specific challenges against enemies to the Tournament mode that tasks you to rise up through the ranks to win six unique cups, there really is a jamboree’s worth of content provided. Scratch just a

deeper, though, and it soon becomes clear that most of these modes are extremely ‘one-and-done’ in nature with very little replay value.

Fortunately, I did get a kick out of Mario Tennis Fever’s all-new Mix it Up mode, which makes a habit of placing you on quirky, challenge-specific courts while facing all kinds of outlandish hazards. My favourite of the bunch is easily the Wonder Court match type, purely for how unpredictable it is in terms of what’s asked of you in a similar fashion to the game that inspired it, Super Mario Bros. Wonder.

What begins as a standard match can quickly go haywire once the Wonder Flower appears and eventually you hit it, where you suddenly can be challenged to contend with ball-spewing warp pipes and other types of mayhem while trying to gain the maximum number of Wonder Seeds possible. There were times playing this mode where I wondered why the game wasn’t called Mario tennis Wonder since, despite the short bursts of chaos this court allows for, it struggles to live up to its potential.

Another source of chaos is, of course, Mario Tennis Fever’s titular gimmick, Fever Rackets. These work much differently to the core racket-breaking mechanic found in 2018’s Mario Tennis Aces in that winning matches is no longer about overwhelming your opponent, but outright slipping them up using a flurry of different elemental-powered Fever Shots.

From the self-explanatory Fever Racket types such as Fire and Ice to the more Mario-specific effects they can provide like Spiny and Thwomp, unleashing a Fever Shot on your court rival is a recipe for pure madness. The problem is outside of their visual differences, almost all of them achieve the same effect, which is to slow down your opponent significantly so they struggle to reach the ball in time for their next hit or are taken out of the match entirely for 10 seconds.

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Give me fever

In practice, unlocking and wielding all 30 of the unique Fever Rackets featured in game is a lot of fun, if only to see the marginal ways they force you to dance around your side of the court. There’s even a

degree of strategy they introduce in that if you return a rival’s Fever Shot before it bounces, you have a chance at firing back their own effect to disrupt their side of the court instead of yours.

Fever Rackets are a fun, if somewhat unbalanced, gimmick that sees Mario Tennis Fever violently swerve into more Mario Kart and Super Smash Bros. territory as opposed to a more technically focused tennis game. That said, tennis purists who don’t want to get caught off guard can always turn off Fever Rackets in most game modes, where the more vanilla style of Mario Tennis – one that requires mastery of different shot types – still plays great.

Sadly, where Mario Tennis Fever

falls short for me is in its Adventure mode. What could have been a quirky and fun journey where Baby Mario and Luigi battle through the wilds using different racket types is let down by two aspects: a short length and a painfully tedious tutorial section at the start of the story.

I managed to beat Adventure in roughly four hours, which is fine for a mode that isn’t

the sole focus of this sports spin-off offering, but becomes an issue when nearly two hours of it is spent laboriously learning the differences between a drop shot, lob shot, power shot, and so on… Admittedly, it’s framed in a cutesy enough manner, with the baby brothers learning the ropes at a dedicated tennis academy, but I imagine even young players will find practising shots against a Piranha Plant robot extremely boring.

Adventure mode does eventually open up into a small but charming island adventure about defeating different monsters. Again, though, just as it picks up steam, it's over too soon, and some of the levels (if you want to call them that) can be over in under a minute if you land every unique shot it wants you to perfectly.

Adventure mode’s main saving grace is the inclusion of Baby Wario and Waluigi, the latter of which makes his debut here in Mario Tennis Fever. Also transformed into babies at the start of the story, they operate almost as Team Rocket-style foils, forever goading and teasing Mario and Luigi in ways I couldn’t help but find adorable. Ultimately, Adventure isn’t bad. I just wish there was more of it, and that it didn’t waste its first third spinning its wheels at tennis school.

Mario Tennis Fever is the very definition of a mixed bag. On the one hand the core fundamentals of Mario Tennis remain as sharp as they always have, with the addition of Fever Rackets letting players further lean into a more madcap mode of play for those that enjoy unbridled chaos and actively want to unfairly tip the scales.

The number of modes included is very generous, too, with the brilliant Wonder Court Match being a definite highlight. And yet, as an overall package, Mario Tennis Fever feels a bit misguided, most obviously made apparent by a short Adventure mode that barely gets going. Mario Tennis Fever isn’t

an ace then, but it’s still a long shot away from being a double fault.

Rating: 3/5