Mario Tennis Aces

Genre: Sports (Tennis)

Players: 1-4 Competitive / Team (Local / Online)

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Review:

Mario Tennis Aces is the latest in Nintendo’s series of Mario-branded tennis games, which take the sport and pair it with arcadey gameplay.

Playing this new game, I still find myself yearning for the N64 game. I don’t know what it is, but tennis games have never felt as good as that game (and the one I still consider my favorite, the original Virtua Tennis on the Dreamcast), which focused on strong, well-designed tennis gameplay and top-notch (for the time) graphics, along with a slew of fun tennis-esque minigames, to deliver an amazing experience. In Aces, however, the problems are numerous.

Firstly, the graphics. This game often looks good, but it also frequently looks terrible. Great animations, expressive character designs, and wonderful use of color are paired with terrible aliasing and some really rough detail work in things like grass. It’s strange, because this game often looks as slick and polished as any first-party Nintendo title, but every now and then it looks like a game that’s rushed or slapped together.

I found aiming in this game to lack the precision of earlier games, although this may have been due to the game rushing through its tutorial content all at once without fully explaining the different kinds of shots.

This is particularly nasty when you have to deal with powerful “zone shots” that can literally break your racket unless you deflect them with perfect timing… but the game doesn’t seem to make clear just what that timing is. Break enough rackets, and you automatically lose a match, which for me tips over from “arcadey” into “just plain stupid”. I hate this mechanic.

Finally, the game’s campaign mode features a story that’s surprisingly talky for a Mario game (and with Toad’s annoying voice at full-annoying here). You’ll be ambling from level to level, some of them really inventive and interesting, but many just as frustrating due to gimmicks that lean heavily on those skills I mentioned earlier.

In the end, Mario Tennis Aces is a game that’s really uneven, with polish in some areas but not others, some really inventive ideas and some really terrible ones. But that a Nintendo Switch game found me wanting to reach for my N64 controller seems like a really unfortunate commentary on how this game doesn’t live up to its legacy.

tl;dr – Mario Tennis Aces is the latest in Nintendo’s arcadey Tennis game series. Unfortunately, this game is really uneven, with a lot of rough edges, some questionable gameplay choices, and it ultimately just isn’t as fun or well-crafted as earlier games in the series. Disappointing.

Grade: C-

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