Mario Tennis Fever review: "Riotous, hilarious, and chaotic, but it can't quite serve up the complete package"

I send a charged topspin shot hurtling across the court. The ball is returned - to my wincing displeasure - by Baby Waluigi, a gurning little thug who's capable of surprisingly powerful flat shots. But Mario Tennis Fever's most wretched infant hasn't reckoned on my doubles partner, Birdo, who's stationed at the net and unleashes a Fever Shot that coats the other side of the court in a tsunami of ink. Petey Piranha replies with a Fever Shot of his own, and a volcanic fissure opens up on our side of the net, spewing globs of magma. Birdo is scorched, and we're down fifteen-love.

Now if all that sounds a little chaotic, then let me be clear: a doubles match of Mario Tennis Fever can be pandemonium. At its busiest moments it feels like four opera singers bellowing at each other in a cupboard full of fireworks. Occasionally, the cacophony resolves into something tuneful and pleasant. At other times, well, it's anarchy with rackets.

But for all that madcap excess, the courtside fundamentals are as clean and elegant as they have ever been. Each of the game's 38 (thirty-eight!) characters is armed with three basic shots, each mapped to a face button: there's a powerful flat, a slow-moving slice, and a bouncy topspin. In addition to those staples, a simple combination of inputs will produce a lob or a drop shot that can place the ball at the very back or the very front of your opponent's half of the court. It's the deliberate use of these five shots, along with intelligent positioning of your character, that will ultimately secure victory against your opponent - no matter how much magma they throw at you.

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What a racket

Then there's the Fever Rackets, and it's this arsenal of fantastical tennis-sticks that transform a relatively sober game of counters and positioning into an explosion of fire and goop and whirling tornados. You'll choose a racket during the character selection process, and each is armed with a powerful and whimsical ability. The Lightning Racket, for instance, leaves a crackling electrical field at the point that the ball bounces. The Fire Flower Racket, meanwhile, lets you shoot fireballs every time you make a swing for the ball.

Choosing a racket, then, is a little like choosing your kart in Mario Kart World, but rather than giving you slightly faster acceleration or improved handling it's giving you the ability to electrocute Princess Peach. In a further delightful wrinkle, the effects of your opponent's Fever Shots can be thrown back in their stupid face by returning the ball before it bounces on your side of the court. It's a mechanic that often leads to desperate net-side showdowns as players volley the Fever-filled ball back and forth in a frantic attempt to prevent their side of the court being turned into an ice rink/mud pit/banana-strewn hellscape.

Those that admire the arcade purity of the core tennis gameplay may be relieved to discover that you can turn off Fever Rackets (or play in separate ranked online lobbies without them), but while they undoubtedly inject a certain measure of unbalanced hijinks into proceedings, I find it hard to imagine wanting to play without them, especially during the raucous excitement of online or local multiplayer matches.

Yes, they're frequently infuriating and I suspect that some are wildly more powerful than others, but for all the mayhem their effects produce they do still take skill and timing to deploy well. And frankly, it's just so satisfying to turn the pristine clay of your opponent's service line into a mess of waddling Spines and roaring flame that you're unlikely to care about perfect balance when the game is going your way.

Breaking point

Providing all the structure around this polished core experience is a host of multiplayer and single-player modes to choose from, like a big a la carte menu of tennis. Tournament mode offers a simple series of knockout matches that can be tackled in single-player or co-op, each culminating in nothing more than a static screen announcing your victory. On the face of it, they're the equivalent to Mario Kart's Grand Prix experience, but the reality is that a series of back-to-back games of tennis on the same court can't match the sense of variety and progression you get by travelling from Bowser's Castle to Rainbow Road, say.

The Trial Towers mode injects more variety into the formula by presenting a cavalcade of minigames to conquer, with each victory seeing you ascend the tower to a new challenge. Swing Mode, meanwhile, lets you take to the court using motion controls, in a surprisingly taxing test of coordination that requires you mix analogue stick controls for character movement and shot direction with motion controls for swinging your racket. And then there's Mix It Up, a hodgepodge assortment of score attack minigames and delightfully gimmick-packed tennis courts.

But if you're hoping for a substantial single-player offering to sink your tennis-loving teeth into, you'll probably do as I did and dive into Adventure mode first. Unfortunately, this single-player campaign feels like a chintzy mobile game that's been tacked on to an otherwise premium offering. The throwaway story sees Mario, Luigi, Wario, and Waluigi all transformed into mewling infants. The only way to turn this quartet of babies back into four grown Italian men is - for some reason - to get good enough at tennis to defeat some monsters.

The campaign that follows sounds like a smash on paper - there's minigames and puzzle-solving and boss battles and the promise that baby Waluigi will eventually be turned back into an adult and I'll never have to look at him again. But in practice it's all shockingly charmless - a plodding and humourless text-based story that's punctuated by bizarrely lacklustre tennis action. It seems that by bending the core gameplay to fit its story - having Baby Mario volley flying monsters out of the air, say, or douse fires by thwacking watery orbs into the inferno - Mario Tennis Fever loses the grounded, precise feel that's a hallmark of the rest of the game.

But however tempted I might have been to take a tennis racket to my Switch 2 during the three-and-a-bit hours that made up this campaign (and boy-oh-boy, it felt a lot longer), I was only ever one multiplayer game away from renewed guffaws. The experience of hurling ink and mud and fireballs at your friends - while some small part of your brain tries to still think about court positioning and slices and dropshots - is riotous, hilarious, chaotic fun. It's just a shame that, at launch at least, Mario Tennis Fever can't serve up a more complete package.

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