Mario and sports titles have always shared a volatile chemistry. While the original Switch era delivered a mixed bag of athletic endeavors, the announcement of Mario Tennis Fever for the Nintendo Switch 2 gave me hope for a return to form, a chance to reclaim the court with racket in hand.
After spending significant time with both the preview build at Nintendo HQ and now the full retail release, it’s clear that while Mario’s latest outing serves up some high-fidelity fun, the core mechanics might leave veteran players feeling like they’ve hit a double fault.
In my initial preview, I noted that using the Fever rackets and the Mix It Up modes was great in a competitive multiplayer setting. After playing the full version, that sentiment remains, but with a significant caveat: strip away the gimmicks, and there is a poor tennis game underneath.
The Fever rackets, extra abilities, piranha plant fireballs, and lobbing giant hippos are perfectly tuned for children and party nights. They pair exceptionally well with the return of fun-for-a-minute motion controls in Swing Mode, creating a chaotic, inclusive atmosphere. However, for those seeking real competition, the base tennis engine is lacking.
There is a persistent, nagging issue where your character will occasionally slide into place rather than feeling directly under your control. This results in an unnatural hit animation where your character connects with a ball they should have missed, or conversely, misses a shot that felt well within reach. It breaks the immersion and saps the reward from precise positioning.
One of the most jarring shifts from Mario Tennis Aces is the gameplay's weight. Aces had a distinct snap to it, a refined feel reminiscent of the Virtua Tennis series. Fever abandons this in favor of a much more floaty, arcadey physics model where characters glide into position and shots feel slow.
Playing Fever feels less like a professional match on grass or clay and more like indoor short tennis. The ball doesn't seem to have the same bite, and the rallies, while tense, lack the tactile thud of a well-timed power shot. For someone raised on the Virtua Tennis balance of career depth and engine precision, Fever feels like a lateral move in visuals but a step backward in mechanical feel.
Gameplay aside, there is one area where Nintendo never misses, it’s the trademark Nintendo Feel. The graphics and music are, as expected, top-tier.
- Visuals: The colors pop on the Switch 2 hardware, and the character animations are bursting with personality.
- Court Variety: The mix of courts is excellent. I particularly loved playing on the practice courts, where you can see other Mushroom Kingdom residents playing their own matches in the distance, making the world feel alive.
- Loading Times: The technical optimization is impressive. The game loads incredibly fast, taking you from the Switch 2 home screen to a quick match in mere seconds.
In an era where live service models often gut sports games to sell you the pieces back, Mario Tennis Fever is refreshingly old-school. I was genuinely pleased to find that you have to unlock and earn characters, courts, and rackets through gameplay.
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In my preview, I mentioned that the Story Mode (Adventure) would be what "makes or breaks" the game for me. Having now played it, I’m disappointed to report that it falls flat.
On paper, it should work: an adventure/campaign infused with RPG elements and tennis. In practice, however, it feels like a soulless, short mini-game grind designed solely to level up your stats. There is very little narrative hook, and the RPG elements are skin-deep. While it serves as a tutorial for the various Fever mechanics, it lacks the heart of the classic Game Boy era Mario Tennis titles.
When you play solo, the gimmicks get stale quickly. Without the human element of a friend sitting next to you to laugh at a well-timed hippo-lob, you’re left staring at a tennis engine that simply isn't robust enough to carry the experience on its own.
The Trial Towers and Tournament modes provide a temporary distraction, but once you play them a few times, you eventually find yourself craving real competition that the AI just can't simulate effectively. The true soul of Mario Tennis Fever, and its primary selling point, is the multiplayer. Whether playing locally with 2-4 players or jumping online, the experience is nearly flawless.
Mario Tennis Fever is a competent, beautiful, and fast-loading sports title that suffers from an identity crisis. It wants to be a high-octane party game, and in that regard, it succeeds wildly. Perhaps I want a different type of tennis game than what Nintendo is serving here, but at its core, the tennis mechanics should feel better before all the Mario flair is added on top.
However, by softening the tennis mechanics and moving away from the feeling of control, it alienates the hardcore fans further than they were. A polished, vibrant package that excels in a room full of friends, but fails to provide the deep, mechanical satisfaction required to unseat the greats of the genre.
It hasn't moved the needle forward from the last iteration; in fact, the gameplay mechanics feel worse than Aces despite the improved hardware. It’s a great addition to a game night with some friends, but it isn’t the Virtua Tennis replacement I'd hoped for.
