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A new, detailed trailer for Mario Tennis Fever gives us a good look at the new elements introduced by the latest entry in the long-running series, and the emphasis here really seems to be whole new levels of way to mischievously cheat. I’m not a professional tennis referee, but I’m fairly sure it’s frowned upon to set fire to the court, or spawn enormous enemies to distract your opponent.
Camelot has been making Mario Tennis games since before your uncle got his first job at Nintendo, with the very first released for the N64 in 1999. Mario Tennis Fever is the seventh entry in the franchise, and the first new one in eight years, a direct follow-up to the 2018 Switch installment, Mario Tennis Aces. However, gone here are the game-pausing and time-slowing Zone Shots of Aces, replaced by the all-new Power Rackets, which allow the roster of 38 characters (at launch—it’s likely more will be added in the months to follow) to do all sorts of court-changing shenanigans when power meters are filled, like freezing the opponent’s side of the court, or causing little fires to spring up all over.
You can, of course, switch all of that off and just enjoy a slightly more realistic version of a tennis match, with new slides and dives for shots, and control the game (much like Aces) with your Joy-Con swung around like a tennis stick.
New additions to the playable characters this time out are not exactly the most exciting. You’ve got Goomba (he holds the racket with his mouth, since you asked), Nabbit (the purple bunny-like thieves from New Super Mario Bros. U) and best of all, Baby Waluigi. There are also a bunch of new bizarro game modes as you might expect, like a great-looking mode where you aim the ball at Piranha Plants to feed them, causing the court to grow new patches of grass and increase in size, and one played on a court that’s designed like a pinball machine.
There are also Wonder Court Matches, which bring in elements from the recent 2D Super Mario Bros. Wonder, an Adventure mode made up of individual levels, and four-player local matches, for which the game uses the Switch 2’s Game Share feature so not everyone needs a copy. There’s online too, of course, with ranked matches and tournaments alongside more casual games, meaning the only thing missing is an RPG mode. RPG MODE! Camelot! Bring back RPG modes! There was no greater Mario sports title than Mario Golf: Advance Tour, and yet RPG mode has been missing from all of the Golf and Tennis games since!
It looks like an awful lot has been packed in here, hopefully seeing Camelot continue to recover the series’ reputation after the Wii U’s Mario Tennis: Ultra Smash. Not too long to find out, with the game out on February 12.
English (US) ·