Mario Tennis Fever Review – Familiar Faults

Mario Tennis has become one of Nintendo's most predictable franchises, showing up relatively early in the lifespan of all of the company's recent platforms, and sure enough, Mario Tennis Fever is being served up within the Nintendo Switch 2's first year on the market. Promising more characters and modes than ever before, as well as a wide array of new gameplay-altering "Fever Rackets," this may well be the most feature-rich Mario Tennis to date.

Is Mario Tennis Fever a swinging good time or will it leave fans cold? Lace up your shoes and tighten your rackets; it's time to find out.

If you've played the last couple of entries in this series, particularly the Switch 1 game Mario Tennis Aces, you should be fairly familiar with the fundamentals here in Mario Tennis Fever. Players have a variety of basic shot types at their disposal, such as slices, flats, lobs, and drop shots, that offer some degree of control over where you direct the ball on the court. You can also charge up your shots or, in some cases, line up your avatar with star markers that appear on the court for a powerful Star Shot. Mario Tennis Fever's on-court action has a somewhat "canned" feel: in real tennis, carefully managing your position and the power of your shots in order to keep the ball in bounds is a constant concern, but faults essentially don't exist in Fever, and the ball generally reacts in a fairly predictable way. That said, there are enough different types of shots here to allow for a certain amount of strategy.

Visually, Mario Tennis Fever looks alright, although not significantly better than Mario Tennis Aces and a step below what you expect from most Mario games in 2026. Characters animate rather stiffly compared to something like Mario Kart World, or other recent Mario sports titles like Mario Strikers: Battle League, and I even noticed some odd framerate drops, particularly when serving the ball for whatever reason.

Of course, it wouldn't be a new Mario Tennis without some sort of fresh gimmick to spice up the action, and this time around, it's the addition of the aforementioned Fever Rackets. While each character in the game has their own inherent strengths and weaknesses, you can also choose one of approximately 30 Fever Rackets, most of which grant you some sort of special ability.

Rallying with your opponent will build up your Fever Gauge, which you can spend to unleash a Fever Shot, which can be precisely aimed at specific sections of the court. While some Fever Rackets confer passive buffs, such as the Swerve Racket that gives your shots more curve, most Fever Rackets will spawn some sort of disruption on your opponent's side of the court upon the delivery of a Fever Shot – a scattering of banana peels, an erupting volcano, vision-obscuring mudholes, etc. Ah, but if you can return a Fever Shot before it hits the ground, you can turn its effect back on your opponent. You also have to keep a close eye on your HP bar -- yes, there is a life bar in this tennis game -- as most Fever attacks will do damage to you. If your life bar reaches zero, you'll be rendered particularly sluggish for a few seconds, or if you’re playing a doubles match, you'll have to sit out the match for a spell, leaving your partner on their own.

The Fever Racket system is promising in theory, but in practice, it has some serious issues. The various disruptions inflicted by Fever Shots simply last way too long. The erupting volcano I mentioned in the previous paragraph will sit there in the middle of your court spurting lava over the course of several serves. And by the time the volcano finally disappears, your opponent has likely earned another Fever Shot and can immediately plant another damn volcano.

Given how quickly Fever Shots are earned, and the fact that all players carry their own Fever Rackets (in fact, you can choose to go into a match with two swappable rackets, for a total of eight possible different effects in a doubles match), it all can quickly compound into an absolute shmozzle. In some cases, this can be fun and frantic, but the wrong combination of Fever Rackets and effects can result in a situation where it's almost impossible to even keep track of what's going on. Mario Tennis Fever developer Camelot needs to do some serious balancing on some of these Fever Rackets, plain and simple.

Mario Tennis Fever offers a fairly hearty selection of ways to play, including a single-player Adventure mode, Tournaments, fighting-game-style Trial Towers where you have to make your way through a series of sometimes-tricky challenges, a handful of novelty courts collected under the "Mix It Up" section, and, of course, Free Play, online modes, and the now-standard motion-controlled Swing Mode.

Adventure is arguably the headliner of the bunch, but, unfortunately, it largely disappoints. It's no secret that the story modes in recent Camelot-developed Mario sports titles are basically just tutorials, but Mario Tennis Fever makes it painfully obvious. The game kicks off with Mario and pals going on a quest to acquire a Golden Fruit that will cure Daisy of a mysterious ailment. Said fruit is located on an unexplored island, but Wario and Waluigi's usual troublemaking leads to a confrontation with some shadowy, spidery monsters that somehow turn Mario, Luigi, Peach, Wario, and Waluigi into babies.

What follows is at least a couple of hours of painfully dry tutorials, as Baby Mario and Luigi reacquire their skills (they aren't even able to return a ball over the net at first). These early hours of Adventure mode fall into a very predictable loop -- do a couple of Mario-Party-style minigames, which often have little to nothing to do with tennis, complete a couple of simple tests of your skills, do a literal quiz-style knowledge test, then play a quick tennis match before moving on to the next grade and doing it all again.

Eventually, you do graduate from tennis school and things get a bit more interesting, with players facing some unique challenges and various boss battles, but this latter part of Adventure mode feels very compressed. It's bam, bam, bam, one enemy encounter or boss after another. There's a single dungeon that actually requires a small amount of navigational skill in the game, but then, nothing like that is ever done again. While Adventure mode offers a few memorable moments over its roughly 4-hour runtime, it is overall very uneven and haphazardly put together.

As for Fever's other modes, the Tournaments and Trial Towers are fine, yet fairly shallow options (there are only three levels of tournament to work through, for instance). The wacky Mix It Up modes, which challenge you to do things like play tennis in a giant pinball machine or on a court affected by Wonder Flower effects, just add more chaos to an already chaotic core experience.

Ultimately, Mario Tennis Fever suffers from the same problem this series has struggled with for generations now: it's at its most fun when you strip away the game’s unique "Mario" gimmicks. The game allows you to disable Fever Rackets, which I fairly quickly started doing when I could (they can't be escaped in a lot of the single-player content). Of course, this raises the key question -- if you're not going to embrace the new gimmick, how is Mario Tennis Fever really all that different than, say, Mario Tennis Aces, which is also playable on the Switch 2?

Make no mistake, whether you ban Fever Rackets or choose to embrace the chaos, Mario Tennis Fever, like all games in the series, is still often a good time, particularly when playing against other human beings. And the game gives you a ton of options for doing that, including splitscreen on a single system, local multi-system multiplayer, online play, and even GameShare with those who don't own the game. It's these multiplayer options that are going to keep folks playing Super Mario Fever long term, so it's nice that Nintendo has made its tennis club so accessible.

This review was based on a copy of Mario Tennis Fever provided by Nintendo.

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