Mario Tennis Fever review: Mario Kart power-ups reinvent a sports classic

​Distinguishing Mario sports games from their real-world, licensed competitors — or from Nintendo’s own Wii and Switch Sports series of motion-control games — can be tricky. Nintendo and Camelot Software Planning, which makes most of these games, have a few levers they like to pull.

Sometimes they include a role-playing-game-style story mode, as in the much-loved Mario Golf: Advance Tour and Mario Tennis: Power Tour for Game Boy Advance. Sometimes they embellish the sport with gimmicky arcade mechanics, as in the Switch entries, Mario Tennis Aces and Mario Golf: Super Rush. Another tack is what I think of as Mario Kartification, or, to put it another way: the addition of power-ups. Camelot has tended to shy away from this approach, while Next Level Games, developer of the Mario Strikers soccer series, has embraced it.

For the Switch 2’s Mario Tennis Fever, Camelot has decided to go with options 1 and 3. Adventure mode is back, and it’s more fleshed out than some recent examples, but it still feels like a clumsy obligation living in the long shadow of the GBA classics. The power-ups, though — the Fever rackets referred to by the game’s title — well, they’re spectacular.

The basics of Camelot’s tennis simulation haven’t changed much in the last 25 years. This remains a tennis game in which it’s almost impossible to hit the ball out, and which is much more about quick-thinking, strategic shot choice than precise timing. You can press the button long before the ball arrives for your character to strike — indeed, if you’re in position, it’s a good idea to, as it charges up a stronger shot. You choose from topspin, slice, and flat shots, with a double tap adding yet more power, or button combinations introducing lobs and drop shots.

With some of Aces’ mechanics, like trick shots and racket damage, pruned away, this remains a brilliant foundation for video game tennis — forgiving, rhythmic, allowing for lots of tactical depth, working equally well in singles or doubles, and favoring long, exciting rallies. Put enough pressure on your opponents and they’ll make slow, looping returns which open up Star Shots; hit your mark with a well-timed flat shot and you can annihilate these with a satisfying smash.

Over time, you fill a Fever meter up to a maximum of two charges. With a normal racket equipped, a Fever shot is still potent — it’s powerful and precise, executed from high in the air, and gives you a second of slow-mo in which to pick your angle. But the Fever rackets make things really interesting. Some of them are wild and weaponized in true Mario Kart tradition, peppering your opponent’s court with fireballs, mud, banana skins, and other hazards. Many of these reduce HP; if your HP reaches zero, you’ll be slowed down in singles, or forced to sit courtside for a while in doubles.

But Camelot hasn’t limited itself to this kind of combative thinking, and other Fever rackets swing the game in your favor in different ways. The Shadow Racket summons a CPU-controlled shadow double of your player that can cover half the court for you. The Ghost Racket makes you — and the balls you return — invisible to the other player. The Swerve racket bends your shots around the court in impossible parabolas. The Chargin’ Chuck Racket changes the shape of the ball and makes it bounce erratically.

These clever power-up designs can be stacked tactically with the well-differentiated roster of 38 characters, whose variation goes deeper than their stats or where they slot into the six archetypes (All-Around, Powerful, Speedy, Defensive, Tricky, and Technical). Individual characters have special skills or affinities for particular shots. Koopa Troopa has a lethal, fast-charging drop shot, for example; Boo a wickedly curving slice; and Luma rewards precise timing with ultra-powerful returns.

Played in vanilla Free Play or Tournament mode, with Fever rackets or without, Mario Tennis Fever is just a superb tennis game. It’s riotous without being out of control, easy to pick up without being shallow, devious without being unfair. The Fever rackets and the large, well-thought-out character roster — almost all of whom are unlocked just by playing the game in any mode — leave a huge number of permutations to explore as you refine your playstyle. Online ranked play is moreish, but in local multiplayer it really sings.

Camelot hasn’t stopped there. The Trial Towers offer escalating skill challenges over 10 short matches with special conditions. Mix It Up mode includes even more outlandish Special Match styles, including the series’ long-standing Ring Shot score attack mode and Wonder Court Match. In the latter, Super Mario Wonder’s Wonder Seeds unleash bizarre on-court events, such as a blizzard of bouncing Hoppos. (Wonder Court Match is not the only arena where that game makes its presence felt in Fever. Nintendo is really doubling down on Super Mario Wonder’s Talking Flower; the loquacious flora is a ubiquitous presence here, not least as the main match commentator.)

These are fun diversions, even if the excellence of Fever’s core gameplay makes them somewhat superfluous. Adventure, however, arrives freighted with more significance, and longstanding series fans will approach it with justified trepidation.

The bizarre, slapdash storyline involves Mario and Luigi (and Wario and Waluigi) being turned into babies by some monsters. Playing as Baby Mario, often accompanied by a CPU Baby Luigi in doubles, you train up your tennis skills in order to reclaim the Bros.’ adulthood from the monster menaces. There’s a long tennis academy section, which acts as a slow but useful tutorial covering all the game’s nuances. Beyond that, the brothers’ quest ambles between thin pretexts for tennis matches, the introduction of new Fever rackets, and passable fire-and-forget minigames involving hitting things with a racket. Everything showers you in tons of XP (I was level 35 after a couple of hours’ play) while doling out stat boosts in imperceptible, tiny increments.

There’s a world map, there are a surprisingly large number of bespoke encounters, there are even locations that slightly resemble dungeons. It is definitely a single-player story mode for a sports game of some length. It exists. But why? Beyond the tutorializing at the Academy, I’m not sure I could tell you. Beyond saying “because you asked for it,” I don’t think Camelot could either. The concept of training up a hopeful player of your own design, central to the GBA games, has been lost in the shallow leveling and absurd contortion of the plot into a fanciful, Mushroom-Kingdom-appropriate, Super Mario RPG-style saga.

Camelot has done more than enough to set Mario Tennis Fever apart. Arguably, it has done more than it should have. Just don’t judge the game on Adventure mode alone, which atomizes its charm and serves it back to you, morsel by morsel. Mario Tennis Fever is a perfect arcade sports game offering a generous plethora of ways to play it. But it only ever needed one. With friends, in Quick Play, it’s a joyous, fluid, tactical, unpredictable see-saw, always demanding one more match. It’s hard to imagine tiring of it.​