Haunted Rackets
Mario Tennis Aces has a story in its single-player Adventure Mode that involves an evil tennis racket, but it doesn't really matter. The narrative is complete nonsense that exists solely to justify playing tennis and completing tennis-based challenges across a variety of environments, such as ice court, a haunted house court, and a volcano court.
Mario roams a simple overworld map of different stages connected by paths, like in Super Mario World and other classic Mario games. The Adventure Mode stages include standard tennis matches, challenges like hitting targets or keeping up volleys, and boss fights against large monsters. The boss fights ultimately work just like the other challenges; you hit the ball at the monsters' weak points to deplete their health bar. The campaign takes about four to six hours to clear, assuming you don't get stuck on a particular match.
The game incorporates light RPG elements, so Mario's tennis skills gradually improve through the campaign, and he can even earn new rackets that possess different stats. They're extremely light RPG elements, though, and don't carry over into any of the multiplayer modes.
The different courts have their own quirks and gimmicks, which adds to the stage varity. A court in a forest area features pipes lined up across the net with Piranha Plants that pop up to eat balls and spit them in random directions. A court on a ship has a big mast in the center of the net that can send balls bouncing in unpredictable ways. These are fun, interesting elements that feel like items and stage gimmicks in Super Smash Bros.. You can play with them enabled, but they're not ideal for competitive matches. Fortunately, you can turn the court gimmicks off in the multiplayer modes.
Adventure Mode is punctuated with sudden, frustrating difficulty spikes. The initial stages are simple if occasionally challenging, but once you get past the first forest area and beat the first boss, the matches become remarkably hard. Even with its RPG elements, Adventure Mode forces you to improve your skills if you want to advance; grinding won't help.
Pick Your Shots
Improving your skills in Mario Tennis Aces is important, because the tennis gameplay in Mario Tennis Aces is not unlike a well-balanced fighting game. The face buttons perform different types of shots: A performs a topspin shot, B performs a slice, Y performs a flat shot, and X combined with pressing up or down on the left control stick respectively performs a lop or drop shot. You can also unleash trick shots by tilting the right analog stick; when triggered, your player jumps acrobatically across the court to hit a ball that's would ordinarily be out of reach. For all of these shots, you tilt the left analog stick after you make contact to guide the ball in different directions across the court.
Those basic shots offer a ton of strategy. Every shot has certain situations in which it's useful, and certain ways to defend against it. A drop shot can confound an opponent playing the backcourt, but is easily returned from the forecourt. A lob can fly over an opponent riding the net. A well-placed slice can catch an opponent hugging the center service line off guard.
Of course, this all depends on the player character and the opponent character. While the Adventure Mode's RPG element are absent in multiplayer, different characters have different styles of play. Powerful characters like Bowser, Donkey Kong, and Chain Chomp cover a lot of the court with their bodies and have powerful smashes, but they move slowly. Defensive players like Waluigi and Bowser Jr. have long reach with their rackets, but are also slow and lack power. Technical players like Peach and Toadette hit very accurate shots, but can be knocked back easily by smashes. These factors all play in how you approach a match, and you can't use the same techniques to beat Boo that you used to beat Wario.
If these tools aren't enough, you must consider energy meters, Zone Shots, and the ability to slow down time. For example, you can build up energy by keeping up volleys and holding the shot button down longer before the racket hits the ball. During volleys, some shots highlight where they will land with glowing star-shaped outlines on the court. With enough energy, pressing the R button while standing at the star will trigger a Zone Shot, which changes the camera to a first-person perspective and slows down time, letting you decide precisely where you want to hit the ball on the court. Your character then smashes a very powerful, fast, and difficult-to-deflect shot to that point.
A Zone Shot can be blocked, but it's tricky to do so. Opponents can use their own energy meter to slow down time and rush to the ball before it flies past them, but this requires perfect timing. If the timing is off, the ball damages your character's racket. When a racket gets too damaged, it breaks and the other character gets a point. Typically, characters have a limited number of rackets available, and when they run out of them, they lose the match regardless of score (this can be turned off, like court gimmicks).
If characters builds enough energy to completely fill their meter, they can trigger a Special Shot. This acts like a Zone Shot, but can be used anywhere on the court. Special Shots can be devastating with the right timing.
With deep, strategic, timing-based mechanics and the inherent variability of tennis as a sport, Mario Tennis Aces works best as a multiplayer game. The adventure mode is worth playing to learn the mechanics and build your skills, but the real fun in the game is playing against other people.
Best With Friends
Mario Tennis Aces provides ample opportunity to play tennis against friends and strangers in both singles and doubles matches. Up to four players can compete against each other on one Switch, two can pit their Switches against each other, or doubles pairs can put two Switches in head-to-head competition. Local multiplayer is very flexible, with numerous options for how you want each match to work. You can enable and disable court gimmicks, Special Shots, and racket breaking, or keep all of the wacky parts of the game enabled. It feels a lot like Super Smash Bros. with extensive options for making fights as chaotic and absurd as possible or completely balanced and tournament-ready as you like.
Online Free Play is a bit less limited, but you can still choose between playing a simplified match that strips out the gimmicks and a standard match with power shots and court hazards. You can also play single or doubles matches online, with up to two players on one Switch. Make sure you have a very consistent Wi-Fi connection, or use the Switch in console mode with an Ethernet adapter for online play; I noticed a fair amount of connection hiccups and jerky action when playing over Wi-Fi.
If you want to take play a little more seriously, you can enter a tournament. Mario Tennis Aces has both offline and online tournaments, though the online ones are naturally more interesting. In both cases, you take your preferred player into a single-elimination singles tournament, paring down from 8 (offline) or 16 (online) competitors to one winner. The mode is for one player only; you can't form a doubles team. The offline tournament mode is simple and similar to Mario Kart's equivalent mode.. There are three tiers of difficulty (Mushroom, Flower, and Star Cups), and the latter two can get very challenging. Energy, racket strength, and Special Shots all come into play in the offline tournament, and computer players can be downright punishing with their smashes.
The online tournament mode is a bit more involved. The structure is generally the same, but you can choose between Simple and Standard modes as in in Free Play. Players are matched against each other, and as you win matches you move up in the tournament. The better you do, the more overall points you get, which accumulate through the month for comparison on online leaderboards. Nintendo plans to track tournaments on a monthly basis, and participation at least once a month will unlock upcoming free DLC players like Koopa Troopa, Blooper, and Diddy Kong.
Watch: Let’s Play Mario Tennis Aces
Swing is a Miss
If you miss the motion-controlled fun of Wii Sports and Wii Sports Resort, you can try Mario Tennis Aces' Swing Mode. It lets you play tennis matches using motion controllers, swinging your Joy-Con like a tennis racket. It sounds fun on paper, but the motion detection, combined with using the analog stick to maneuver around the court instead of the Wii Sports games' technique of automatically running toward the ball, feels awkward.
Swing Mode is a complicated and imprecise control setup that doesn't feel nearly as good as using the buttons and analog sticks to perform just the right shot at just the right time. Fortunately, it's a very minor, optional mode in the game. The fact that Swing Mode is its own mode and not simply an alternative control option might even indicate that Nintendo knows that the motion controls simply don't feel good enough to use regularly.
Service Ace
Mario Tennis Aces is an incredibly satisfying, competitive arcade sports gamethat takes a simple formula and adds just enough depth to feel challenging and engaging. While the game is a bit light on content compared with more single-player-oriented titles, Mario Tennis Aces' situational strategies make matches feel like rounds in a fighting game.
That's enough depth to keep coming back, especially if you have friends you can play with locally. This is one of the best sports games on the Switch, and stands alongside Mario Kart 8 Deluxe and Puyo Puyo Tetris as a must-have game for parties, or any time friends can come by and grab some controllers.
