Mario Tennis Fever Hands-On Preview: Kicking Off Mario’s 40th Year In Style

Mario Tennis Fever is set to launch on 12 February, and after recently going hands-on with the game, I’m certain that I’ll be gracing its courts at every given opportunity all year long.

Usually, all my tennis attention is focused on Wimbledon. Between the traditions, grounds, and quality of the sport on display, the event is unbeatable. Well, almost. It’s got some competition this year - Nintendo may have scored an ace with Mario Tennis Fever.

After spending around 30 minutes or so with the game, I came away heartily impressed. No question marks. No concerns. Mario Tennis Fever builds upon the classic formula with some impactful and thrilling new additions, namely Fever Rackets and special matches, the latter of which pays homage to another stellar Mario entry.

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Better With Friends, But Still A Blast Alone

If you’re new to the franchise, worry not. Mario Tennis Fever features a handy little tutorial that’ll bring you up to speed on the basic controls before letting you put them to the test against a pretty forgiving Luigi. I wouldn’t say you particularly need to be a fan of tennis either. Mario Tennis Fever, especially when played with others, has the warm camaraderie of a title like Super Mario Party Jamboree or Mario Kart World. Sure, it helps if you know your dropshots from your aces and that may give you an upper hand in the title’s early stages, but the game will soon impart all of the information you need which, handily, isn’t much.

In the game’s standard mode, matches function much as they would in real life outside of scoring. The matches I played centered around being the first player or team to score seven points, so there’s no games and sets to complicate matters. I will add that I don’t know for certain whether you can extend matches beyond seven points. Outside of this, your goal is simple: return the ball. Of course, you can do so via a number of different ways. There’s forehand and backhand swings as well as dropshots. You can even put some topspin on the ball to really catch your opponents off guard. Trust me, I fell victim to that on several occasions.

Fever Rackets Are a Brilliant New Feature, Adding Variety Into The Formula

It’s the Fever Rackets though that really spice things up. Mario Tennis Fever has around 30 Fever Rackets to choose from, each imbued with its own power. You’ll need to fill a gauge by successfully returning enough shots but once you’ve done so, players can press Y to activate said power. I tried to test out as many as I could in the time given and was able to set my opponent’s side of the court on fire, cover it in slippy banana skins, and spawn a phantom second player on my own side.

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It goes without saying that successfully activating a Fever Racket’s power most definitely gives you the upper hand. The fact that there are so many on offer adds great replayability to an already moreish formula. I should also mention that you can play both doubles and singles, and recruiting some friends makes the experience all the more chaotically fun.

Special Matches Already Have My Attention

Chaos is perhaps an apt word to lead me on to the special matches Mario Tennis Fever players can enjoy. I only had the opportunity to sample one, but it was an absolute blast. Earlier, I mentioned an ode to another franchise title. Well, there’s a special match themed around Super Mario Bros. Wonder which, partway through, will see you activate a Wonder Seed. As you’ve likely gathered, this transforms the match with Wonder Seeds working as they do in that base game.

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We played through a couple iterations of this special match and in one instance, the Wonder Seed spawned a bunch of bouncing hippos that flew around instead of tennis balls. The goal was to hit the glowing blue one which contained the Wonder Seed, therefore scoring you a point. Another time, the Wonder Seed activated a row of ever-changing pipes in place of the court’s net. They’d shoot up and down with a Wonder Seed once again eventually appearing. The fact that this mode alone had so much variety leaves me very hopeful as it’s merely one out of several special matches on offer.

It goes without saying that I undoubtedly need to spend more time with Mario Tennis Fever to determine how it holds up amidst regular play, especially as we didn’t sample its Adventure Mode. Given the sheer number of Fever Rackets on offer though paired with an impressive teaser of what special matches add into the mix, I’m hopeful that this game has all of the right ingredients to deliver. While a game of this nature is always more fun with friends, it’s most definitely one I could see myself playing solo regularly and often. Mario’s 40th anniversary year looks set to kick off in promising fashion.

Mario Tennis Fever is set to launch on 12 February on Nintendo Switch 2.