“Mario Tennis Fever turns up the heat by adding in racquets that’ll drive some players insane”
Game SynopsisGame CreditsCastDeveloper & PublisherPlatform & Release
Swing into action with 30 different Fever Rackets, each with their own special abilities, and 38 playable characters – the most in series history. Pair topspins, slices, lobs and other familiar shots with new slide moves and defence-focused footwork.
Kevin Z. Afghani, Courtney Lin, Giselle Fernandez, Laura Faye Smith, Kate Higgins, Laila Berzins, Laura Stahl, Kazumi Totaka, Kenny James, Caety Sagoian, Koji Takeda
Platforms: Nintendo Switch 2
Release Date: February 12, 2026
I’m not sure how they keep coming up with different ways to slightly innovate on the game of Tennis with Mario and friends, but Nintendo does, and Mario Tennis Fever has decided that they’ll add in ‘Hell’ as an option for this latest entry. Well, not quite, but the addition of a tennis raquets that do things like add fireballs and ice patches to the tennis field feels like hell.
These raquets, which can be turned off if you prefer the strictly normal tennis feel, are where the ‘Fever’ is added to the game. You unlock more simply by playing more matches. Still, they’ll do all manner of things as I mentioned above, making your opponents, or your own side of the court, feel like hell; also place down a magical wand that’ll change your raquet, or even have a shadow version of your character appear for a short period, turning a 1 v 1 match into a 2 v 1 for a short period. To activate these powers, you build up your ‘Fever Bar’ by hitting the ball, then cast a powerful volley back at your opponent, activating the raquts’ power. Fortunately, or not so, depending on how it goes, you can hit your opponents’ fever shots back at them if you hit the ball before it bounces on the court, and so can your opponent, and in the higher level of challenge, like the online Ranked Play, this happened a lot ot me, and it sucks.
The fundamentals of Tennis are here as well, and you’ll need them if you’re playing with Fever or not. That’s an assortment of slices, flat shots, spits, or drop shots. Learning how to use all of these properly is essential to winning, as is your positioning on the court. But placing a perfectly gentle drop shot just over the net when your opponent is all the way at the back and unable to reach the ball feels just as good as spinning a ball around their backside.
You can still dive into Mario Tennis Fever without wanting to be a pro and learn all of the proper shots — unless you plan on wanting to work your way up the Ranked leadeerboards — as passing the controller to anyone, they’ll easily enough work out hitting just about any button at the right time will send the ball flying back at the person on the otherside of the net in one fashion or another.
There is an ‘Adventure Mode’ here with a light story, but it mostly serves as a good way to go through a bunch of tutorials on improving your Tennis skills. Mario, Luigi, Wario, Waluigi, and Peach are all transformed into babies after trying to get their hands on a fruit, and then spend most of this mode in a training area where you’ll do a bunch of mini-games before taking on a couple of matches to pass onto the next rank. See all that through, and everyone heads on a short-lived adventure to takeon the monster that turned them into babies, and you use your tennis skills to complete mini-games again, and take part in, I guess, boss fights where you need to perform the right shorts to hit different parts of the enemies. It’s fine, but completely forgettable, and not the saving grace of a single-player mode that players have been crying for since the release of Mario Tennis Aces. It does, however, feature some preety cutscenes, and at least all the characters are adorable as little babies.
There is a lot of content here if you want to dig into Mario Tennis Fever to unlock it all, and you’ll need to play across all of the game modes to get it all. There are 38 characters in the roster, all with different stats and feeling different on the court, plus colour variations for a bunch of them, and then you have all the raquets to unlock and extra courts. You’ll need to beat Adventure Mode, play around in the Swing and Mix It Up modes, which are more like arcade party modes, and then take on and beat all of the Trial Towers, which can get rather tricky, and then, of course, earn all of the game’s Championship Cups in single and double pairings. If you do love some Mario Tennis, there’s plenty here to keep you busy for a while. But if you’re like me and were looking for more adventure or tournaments, once you’ve beaten the Adventure Mode and earned all of the cups, staring at some of the other modes wasn’t doing it for me.
(Review code provided to Explosion Network.
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