As I played through Mario Tennis Fever‘s barebones campaign and its other forgettable modes, like some scoring challenges, one word emerged from my brain to describe this latest installment in the series: perfunctory. That’s not great. Making it worse, though, is that Nintendo is selling this uninspired tennis game for $70. Ouch.
Out now on Switch 2, Mario Tennis Fever is the latest example of Mario and his pals (and enemies) getting together to play a sport. Sometimes they play golf, sometimes soccer, every so often some baseball, they’ve even played basketball together on occasion. This time around, the sport of choice is tennis, and once again this Mario Tennis adventure is developed by Camelot, a studio that has been making Mario sports spin-offs since 1999. And if all you want is a new Mario Tennis game with a few modes, a decent roster of characters, and multiplayer support, then Fever checks all those boxes. The problem is that it does so with about as much enthusiasm as someone filling out paperwork at the DMV.
Tennis, anyone?
The big star of Mario Tennis Fever is the game’s adventure mode, which functions as a single-player campaign as well as a tutorial for how to play. It only took me about three hours to get through this adventure, and yet that was still too long. Fever‘s adventure mode is all about Mario, Luigi, and a few other key characters getting turned into babies after being attacked by a monster while getting a magic apple to heal Daisy from a horrible illness. To become adults again, they decide the best course of action is to fight the monster, and so they go to a tennis academy as babies to learn how to play a sport they’ve played so many times that there’s an entire franchise dedicated to it. Maybe this sounds goofy and silly. Trust me, it is not.
Cutscenes in Mario Tennis Fever are static, dull, and feature little movement or excitement. I’ve watched Powerpoint presentations that are more energetic and engaging than the cutscenes and narrative moments in Fever.
Between these bits are tennis matches and tennis-themed minigames. None of these are awful, but they all tend to be very short, and I rarely felt like I was digging into some new feature or mechanic. For example, a big new element in Fever is a series of powerful tennis rackets that let you spawn fire, ice, mud, electricity, and other zany effects to disrupt your opponent. They can be powerful in adventure mode, but the game barely spends time on any one racket, so I never felt like I mastered anything before I was zipped off to a new location for more boring cutscenes and dialogue.
As Baby Mario works his way through the adventure mode, he levels up, but you don’t have any control over what stats are improved, nor does the game offer side content for which levelling up is a big help. So the level-up system might as well not exist at all. Eventually, you beat the final boss, and the game ends with one more boring cutscene of characters not moving and chatting. Roll credits.
Seriously, does anybody want to play tennis?
Outside of the short and bad campaign are a series of other game modes that vary in quality from “okay” to “meh.” There are some score challenge mini-games that you can play against the computer or a friend. There’s a freeplay option that lets you and up to three other players locally play some tennis while changing the rules and other variables. There’s also a mode that lets you play using motion controls, but it only includes a handful of the special rackets, which seems bonkers and makes this option a waste. Just play Wii Sports tennis instead.
My favorite mode is tournament, which pits you against different NPCs in a series of nearly uninterrupted tennis matches that lead to one final match to win that particular bracket. It’s not a revolutionary offering, but it at least focuses on the best part of Mario Tennis Fever: the actual act of playing tennis.
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Back-of-the-box quote:
“Come on, there aren’t many other arcade-y tennis games to choose from.”
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Developer
Camelot Software Planning
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Type of game:
Colorful and wacky arcade tennis game
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Liked:
Looks nice, feels fine to play, Fever rackets are fun
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Disliked:
Adventure mode is boring and bad, other modes are mostly forgettable, tennis gameplay feels floaty, $70
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Platforms:
Nintendo Switch 2
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Played:
Finished adventure mode in three hours, play around six hours of other modes solo and against other players
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Release Date:
February 12, 2026
To be clear, I don’t think the tennis gameplay in Mario Tennis Fever is fantastic, as it lacks the depth I want from even the most arcade-y sports games and never felt precise enough for me. But it is easily the best part of the game. Hitting a ball really hard and aiming it at just the right spot to score feels sweet. Long rallies can get intense and, in my time with the game, almost always led to some cheering (or groaning) from folks watching or playing. So the fact that tournament mode focuses entirely on the tennis part of Fever made it easily my favorite way to play this latest Mario sports spin-off.
Oh, and yes, there is online multiplayer, and it works, and… that’s about all there is to say, as it doesn’t feature any truly remarkable options. It’s Mario Tennis Fever, but online. Not exciting, but nice to have.
Look, I get it. Sometimes you just do enough and move on. I’ve done that before in life. I can’t even count the number of times I turned in assignments in school that were just enough to pass and nothing more. Or how often I’d do just enough cleaning as a kid to convince my mom or dad that I’d picked up my room. The thing is, in those cases, I never charged anyone $70 for the privilege of receiving my minimum-effort offerings. Mario Tennis Fever, on the other hand, does just enough to be considered a new Mario Tennis game and calls it a day while charging a premium to play. Wait for a sale or go pick up a used copy of Mario Tennis Aces instead.
