Mario Tennis Fever takes Mario sports back to arcade basics in the best way

Mario Tennis Fever makes a good argument that less can be more in the context of family-friendly sports games.

The Nintendo Switch 2-exclusive title from Nintendo and longtime series developer Camelot Software feels like the product of everyone taking a good, long look at Mario Tennis Aces for the Switch and realizing it had too much going on. While I enjoyed the audacity of that game's fighting game-esque complexities, it ultimately felt alienating to me (and presumably other people of my disposition) because the skill ceiling was too high to realistically enjoy online play once you ran out of solo experiences.

Fever, seemingly as a response to that, gives the player a little bit less to worry about over the course of a match, which lets the still-very-fun basic tennis mechanics shine more. All of that works in tandem with a fun story mode that does a great job of tutorializing Fever's intricacies and enough secondary modes to keep Fever fun at almost any level of engagement.

You can solve any problem by playing tennis

Mario Tennis Fever is, to its credit, not particularly ambitious in terms of what it offers out of the box. There's a single-player adventure mode that most people will probably finish in fewer than 10 hours, a challenge tower mode that provides a series of matches with unique conditions that escalate in difficulty, and a respectable selection of multiplayer options for both traditional tennis matches and wacky party game nonsense.

I imagine the adventure mode will be of great interest to many readers, given that the series has a history of quality solo offerings (particularly in handheld entries) with RPG-like character development and bespoke challenges that creatively make use of tennis mechanics and rules. That's more or less what Camelot put in Fever. Its paper-thin story involves Mario and friends being turned into babies by a mysterious evil force, at which point they have to learn how to play tennis again so they can defeat their adversary and become adults. Mario (the main playable character in this mode) gains experience levels after each challenge, though admittedly, your growing skill as a player feels more meaningful than any quantitative changes gained from leveling.

It's not an extraordinarily long story mode by any stretch of the imagination. The pacing can feel a little odd at the start, given that you're at a tennis academy learning the basics for at least an hour to kick things off. This turns out to be necessary, though, because everything afterward is a further test of your skill. Puzzles and boss fights regularly require the player to hit the ball to certain areas of the court to succeed, making the adventure mode as a whole feel like an extended learning experience, even after you get out of the academy.

It isn't the most mind-blowing story mode in a sports game I've ever seen, but it is fun, and I recommend playing as much of it as you can before jumping into anything else because it is a genuinely useful tool for getting better at Mario Tennis Fever. I also dig the core concept of the adventure mode: that tennis is the main way to solve any problems, big or small, in this world. That's a funny conceit.

Less fighting game, more tennis

As for the tennis itself, as I mentioned previously, it's been pared down in complexity from what was present in Aces. That game had a special move meter you had to manage, alongside rackets having their own HP bar and other contrivances that made it surprisingly sweaty and skillful for a children's tennis game. I don't think that was bad, necessarily, but it did put a hard ceiling on how enjoyable it was to play against other human beings, especially over the internet.

Fever makes what I would say is the right call by putting the player's focus almost solely on tennis. Different characters have different archetypes (speedy, defensive, etc.), and there are new Fever Rackets that have special abilities that I'll get to in a second, but for the most part, Fever is a game about hitting a ball back and forth. Each of the four face buttons does a different type of hit, and certain button combinations or types of timing will perform more advances shots like lobs and drop shots. It's very easy to wrap your head around once you've played for an hour or so.

There is still a meter to manage here, though it's exceptionally simple. It's used for Fever Shots, a new type of shot that, when performed, briefly slows down time, giving the player a chance to aim a very fast-moving shot. When using Fever Rackets, this shot will take on whatever effect is attached to whichever racket you've chosen. One of them creates a field of damaging fire (you can run out of HP, which makes you move slower for a while), another makes you briefly faster and invincible, yet another creates a shadow clone that hits back shots you can't, and so on. These add a good amount of strategy and variety to the proceedings, and I think it's crucial that they're all activated the same way, using a meter that doesn't require any kind of advanced management techniques. You either have the ability to do a Fever Shot, or you don't, at which point you probably will soon because the meter fills up automatically.

I find that this is about the correct level of mechanical depth for a Mario Tennis game. Aces was ambitious, but it quickly became kind of overwhelming if you didn't want to be hardcore about it. Fever, on the other hand, has a learning curve that can be overcome fairly quickly, so you can reasonably expect newcomers to have a good time in casual multiplayer settings.

You might run out of things to do fairly quickly

As I said earlier, the adventure mode is over pretty quickly. The challenge tower mode adds some more single-player meat to the bone, but that too seems like something you can clear out within a week or two of purchase if you feel up to it. As a solo experience, Fever probably won't keep you engaged for dozens or hundreds of hours. You'll either need people to play with locally, or enough bravery to duke it out with others online. I did play a bit of the game online during the review period and can confirm that it works as expected, so this seems like a totally viable way to enjoy Fever, especially now that Nintendo offers comprehensive voice chat.

My only real complaint about the multiplayer is that some of the modes are gimmicky. In particular, there are some more party game-esque modes that are fun to do only once or twice. One of them, inspired by Super Mario Bros. Wonder, adds ridiculous and random conditions to the match, like asking players to hit floating animals back and forth at each other. Another replaces traditional tennis scoring with rings that you have to hit the ball through for points. These are decent ideas that work OK in practice, but I can't see myself playing them over the actual tennis modes on a regular basis.

Still, when it comes to regular tennis, the variety of characters, Fever Rackets, and even courts that offer variable surfaces that change up ball speed means that there's plenty to experiment with. I should also take a moment to mention that Fever, like other first-party Switch 2 games, is gorgeous to look at. It also performs flawlessly.

Ultimately, Mario Tennis Fever may not be remarkable, but that's fine. I appreciate what previous Mario sports games like Aces did to stand out, but ultimately, I just want to play tennis. If you dig tennis video games, this is a pretty good one, and that's really all you can ask for.

Mario Tennis Fever launches exclusively on Nintendo Switch 2 on Feb. 12.