Mario Tennis Open Review

It’s been a long time between drinks for Mario Tennis fans; the last original game was released on the Game Boy Advance nearly 5 years ago. Sure, we’ve had the GameCube game released on the Wii again, but we’d rather not talk about that one.

So when Nintendo announced that another Mario Tennis title was on the way – developed by Camelot who worked on most of the previous iterations – excitement was pretty high. After all, the previous Mario Tennis titles on Nintendo’s handhelds have been great. The have captured the nuances of tennis well, and have included a great RPG mode to string it all together. It was a single player focus through and through. The console versions, on the other hand, have been multiplayer focused, the idea was to play it with as many people as possible in the same room and have some fun, but also enjoy some intense tennis action. Mario Tennis Open is somewhere in the middle; great fun, but in the end it doesn’t know what it wants to be and suffers for it. It’s not all the game it could be.

The first thing you’re going to notice about the game is that Nintendo/Camelot have done all they can to make the game accessible to everyone; the cute interface, the big touch screen controls and ‘that’ gyro-control mode will immediately have you wondering just what’s going on. Thankfully there is a great focus on pure tennis action. Power Shots or Special Shots have been replaced with a new system with special circle zones appearing on the court to make it possible to pull off exaggerated versions of the typical tennis shots. You can of course just do a simple shot if none of these more elaborate shots take your fancy, and it’s always good to fake out your opponent. The computer players won’t fall easily for these tactics though but most of the characters seem to have a weak spot that you can find through trial and error. Different characters have different stats and different techniques; for instance, some are speedy, some are better at defense and others, more powerful. All of your Nintendo favourites are back, including some new ones which I won’t spoil.

The character stats are used to some extent when you use your Mii. Its appearance – of course – is based on your Mii, but the outfit and stats are available to be changed with items you unlocked by playing through the main tournament mode. However, to pay for the items you’ll need to play the games special modes. The items range from shoes, shirts, wristbands and more.

Tournament mode is simple Nintendo tournament fair; 8 cups for singles and double play with the only difference between the cups being the ever-increasing difficulty in the opponents. There really isn’t that much more to the tournament play and without the ability to unlock items, there wouldn’t be much incentive to play through it all, as it can get repetitive.

As mentioned before, you can unlock the character altering items by playing through the games standard single player modes. To get the money to buy them though, you’ll need to play through the games four special modes to get them. Unlike Mario Kart 7, where collecting coins is possible across the majority of modes, you’re only able to do it in certain modes in Mario Tennis Open.

As for the special modes, they are fun and quite challenging; some of them can be quite difficult once you get to the higher levels within them. The Ring Shot is your standard ring mode, hit the rings sooner to get more points but make sure you maintain a rally. Ink Showdown puts you against Piranha plants who spit tennis balls toward you and you have to serve them back so the other player doesn’t hit them. The other two modes are my personal favourites; the Super Mario Tennis mode has you playing through classic Mario stages while maintaining a rally. The screen you hit against scrolls as you play and you have to collect coins as it scrolls. It can get quite intense, but is immensely fun. My favourite mode though is the Galaxy Rally, maybe just because it has the Super Mario Galaxy music, but you play against a Luma on a shifting square floor and have to keep an intense rally going and collect star bits. It just has a very epic feel to it, more of this please!

So let’s talk about those gyro controls. Without a doubt, this is the weakest part of the package and if you don’t turn it off within about half an hour of playing, I’ll be surprised. There are two ways to play the game, either with traditional controls using the slider pad and buttons along with the touch screen for easy reference to the moves you can execute. Alternatively, if you tilt your system up the game will take over movement of your player leaving you to just hit the ball with the touchscreen controls, really basic stuff. 3D will also switch off in this mode, as you’ll tilt the system left and right to change the camera angle. This mode detracts from the overall experience of the game and the more traditional mode of play is much more intuitive.

The gyropscopic control mode is optional and shutting it off completely in the settings is possible if you want. Otherwise, you’ll have to switch it off each match. You can also play online with it forced off but there’s nothing to stop your competition from doing it. Not only is that bad for competitive reasons but it also means someone can play in the ‘Gyro’ mode and just hit buttons and let the AI decide what to do. Not really a fun match up. The addition of this mode might be great for inexperienced gamers, but its implementation is poor and will serve as a disappointment for everyone except for complete Mario Tennis amateurs.

The game’s multiplayer mode is where Nintendo have added some meat to the game, not only can you play the game in singles and doubles with just one cartridge locally but there is a pretty hefty online element as well, maybe not as fleshed out as something like Mario Kart 7, but a solid effort nonetheless.

You can play either singles or doubles with friends online and finding a game is easy, because we’ve had the game before release we couldn’t find anyone publicly to play the game but you can choose to play in an ‘Intense’ or ‘Casual mode for public match’s. It will only search for players within your region for public matches. There is a leaderboard of sorts as well, but it’s limited to just seeing you score against the leader. Online works well, we played several matches with other local journalists and had no problems. There is one foreseeable problem though with online in the future and that is that is no levelling or handicap system online. Once you’ve unlocked everything your player will be a powerful, fast moving tennis machine and little Timmy and his Mii are going to get smashed the first time he tries online. Streetpass players are not forgotten either with a mode that allows you to swap your Tennis Mii with another Mario Tennis Open character and take on your StreetPasser in a virtualised game with them.

Overall, Mario Tennis Open isn’t a terrible game at all; in fact, it’s good at what it does. The game never goes above what it could be though and like an average student at school is quite happy just where it is. Nintendo or Camelot could have packed a lot more content into this, even without a full RPG mode. The gyroscopic controls are a poor addition to the game and while you can turn them off in single player, you can’t force your competition to turn them off and this will annoy a lot of people. However if you’re after a good pick up and play title, something to fill the gaps until the bigger titles later in the year then this one is for you. If Nintendo and Camelot just applied themselves to this one a little more it could have gone from adequate to outstanding.