With the Australian Open in full swing (heh) as I write this, I’m currently being exposed to a heap of tennis and all of it against my will. With the exception of the table variety (thanks Timothée), the game just doesn’t interest me. But as he’s proven with golf, football, baseball and medical practice, my guy Mario has the power to sway my interest in handling balls.
Mario Tennis Fever follows 2018’s Mario Tennis Aces, which I liked well enough, and this time around promises to heighten the tempo of play with the addition of superpowered Fever Rackets. I recently had the opportunity to check out an early preview of the game ahead of its February 12 release and it really seems to be shaping up nicely with a robust feature set and some truly exciting action on the court.
With just around an hour to get acquainted with Fever, there was a lot to get through in a little time, so we stuck to what I would say are the two core experiences – same-screen multiplayer matches and the new Adventure Mode.
Through a quick tutorial, it becomes clear that the core control scheme and physics from Aces are pretty much intact, so it’s up to the new Fever Rackets to shift the paradigm here, and that’s certainly the case. You’ll choose from one of a hefty 30 different rackets as you set up your chosen character before a match, each coming with its own unique power-ups that can be activated once you’ve filled up a gauge during play.
These abilities run the gamut of Mario universe power-ups and obstacles, things like fire and ice, bananas, Bullet Bills and more, typically creating some form of on-court hazard when you successfully launch a Fever Shot into your opponent’s side. My early favourite, for example, spreads a heap of Mini Mushrooms on the ground that cause anyone who runs into them to shrink down to laughable size – not ideal for them. Traditional effects like flames or slippery ice on the court will not just throw you off your game but drain a HP bar, either rendering your player extra slow in singles matches or temporarily taking them off the court in doubles if it reaches zero.
There wasn’t time to try a heap of them, but the Nintendo reps on hand explained that the deeper down the list you go the more skill-based they become. And the kicker with these Fever Shots is, should you manage to volley one back to your opponent, they’re at risk of accidentally hitting their own side with their chosen Fever Racket’s power. So while most of what I played devolved into chaos – especially in Doubles where there could be four different effects all going off at once – it seems like there’ll be plenty of room for skilled play if that’s what you’re looking for.
Adding to the variables, outside of the Fever Rackets, is a massive roster of 38 playable characters, all who have their own stats and broad classes but who can also feel significantly unique to play. Obsessed as I am with weird little guys and critters, I tried out as many as I could here, from Goomba to Wiggler to Chain Chomp, and as you can imagine with all of those different shapes and sizes there’s quite a bit of variation in movement. Wiggler stumbles all over the place with its extra legs and long silhouette, while Goomba bounces around holding the racket in its mouth. With so many potential combinations of player counts, characters and rackets it winds up feeling more dynamic than anything prior in the Mario Tennis catalogue.
After getting acquainted with the basics of play, I was keen to try out Adventure Mode, Mario Tennis Fever’s core single-player offering. The story here kicks off with the reveal that – right before the big Mushroom Kingdom tennis tournament – Daisy has fallen ill. Desperate to get her upright before play kicks off, Mario and crew foolishly take the advice of Wario and Waluigi, who claim that a special golden fruit exists on a remote island that can help Daisy.
Surprisingly, the golden fruit is no lie, but unsurprisingly, the ‘Wa’ brothers had ulterior motives and wind up making off with a bunch of hidden treasure from the island. This angers the island’s big, shadowy, spider-y guardian, which chases the plundering party away but not before using its power to turn every one of them into…babies. Narrowly escaping back to the Tennis Academy, the gang has completed their quest but now have a new challenge to face – trying to win the Mushroom Kingdom tournament as babies! Including, for the first time ever, Baby Waluigi!
The next 30 mins or so are spent doing what anyone else would do in this situation – putting a literal baby through a series of rigorous physical trials in order to get them trained up to play in a high-stakes sporting event. This early part of the adventure is essentially a more in-depth introduction to skilled Mario Tennis play, and the overall goal seems to be earning stickers to rise up the ranks as a player and earn your spot in the tournament.
That’s about as far as I saw of Adventure Mode, but there’s a lot of promise here. You’ll essentially spend all of your time exploring the open Tennis Academy map, talking to the toad custodians and other characters, enjoying some wonderfully funny writing, completing challenges and boss battles while learning new skills, and that seems like a decent format for the meat of this game’s solo play. I’m very keen to get stuck into it fully.
As far as other modes, I also made a run through one of the Trial Towers, which are a gauntlet of tennis-based minigames that challenge you to continue winning and making your way to the top. Some of these are as simple as tennis matches with specific character pairings or power-ups, others might have you attempting to hit balls through rings or deal with multiple balls on the court. The one that almost caught me asked me to score points against a character without letting them return any of my hits, which wasn’t easy.
Lastly, we spent a bit of time dicking around with Swing Mode, the standalone motion-based option that we’ve already seen in the world of post-Wii Sports Mario Tennis titles. Like before, this is a mode cut off from the rest of the game because it shrinks down the scope of gameplay quite a bit, having your characters move on their own so you can focus on your simulated swings and diluting the list of Fever Rackets down to (at least from the portion I played) just half a dozen.
The good news is, this was still a heap of fun, even if I did get my arse handed to me by fellow games media and CPU alike. The Joy-Con 2s don’t immediately feel like they’re doing any better a job than the Joy-Cons in Mario Tennis Aces, but if you year for the simpler days of Nintendo’s motion-based tennis action you’ll still have a good time, probably.
After dabbling in a short few hits around most of what Mario Tennis Fever has to offer, I’m feeling pretty confident in this being a solid follow-up to Mario Tennis Aces, iterating on what already worked and serving up a whole heap of new wrinkles to make things interesting. It looks gorgeous as a Switch 2 exclusive, the Adventure Mode is promising, and the Fever Rackets kept things interesting – especially in the ideal setting of a heated 1-on-1 against a human in the same room.
Mario Tennis Fever releases on Switch 2 on February 12.
Previewed on Switch 2 at an event hosted by Nintendo Australia.
