Mario Tennis: Ultra Smash is the next title in the Mario Tennis series available and it’s available exclusively on the Wii U. Not surprisingly, the graphics are colorful and very well animated, and generally have that Nintendo charm to them, but in almost every other facet of the game, it’s a largely forgettable affair.
I have no prior experience to fall back onto with most Nintendo first part titles, the Mario Tennis franchise is amongst them. From what I have read, and after putting some time in with Ultra Smash, it’s one of the more underwhelming releases in the series, even compared to 2012’s release on the 3DS. If you’re a stickler for only having a single court (although you can set three types of surfaces to play on, clay, hard, and grass), Ultra Smash is indeed limited in that regard. If that were the worst of it, that wouldn’t be a big deal — but the bigger issues come in more important ways, such as the limited amount of game modes and the fact that the game simply fizzles out quickly.
Speaking of game modes, there are five — classic tennis, which includes options for both Singles and Doubles. Within Doubles, you can use an Amiibo (I don’t have any, so I didn’t test this) or a local co-op buddy to play along with. The new Mega Battles is one of the main draws of Ultra Smash, and yeah it looks neat but it doesn’t do much to extend the lifetime of the game unless you’re already hooked on the tennis gameplay itself. In Mega Battles, large mushrooms, one per side of the court, will bounce out randomly onto the court and if you rush over to one and touch it, a quick animation shows your character turn into a giant version of itself. This makes you a bit slower, but you have more reach and a stronger hit. If you take a body shot or simply after so many seconds, your character turns back to normal size. This is all well and good for a short while, but before long I was as content not to go into Mega mode as I was to actually do so, in other words, I became pretty indifferent to it.
The Knockout Challenge mode is a single player endeavor in which you play a random list of increasingly tougher CPU characters. As there are only about a dozen characters in the game, you’ll see a lot of the same faces while traversing this mode, which is a bit of a drag. Being based on tennis, there’s really not a much variety at all between matches within this mode, but as you win you’ll rack up coins which can be spent towards unlocking the twenty-five unlockables, or, you can actually use the coins to advance deeper into Knockout. I may have spent the majority of my time in this mode, but it too got pretty tedious. Things actually get more tepid with Mega Ball Rally, the point of which is to volley the ball back and forth as many times as you can, with a counter keeping track. This mode just wasn’t worthwhile.
Local multiplayer is supported, as is online play, with up to four players. In online, there seems to be no way to connect with anyone other than random players. After making a few tweaks to your match options, it’s game on, and that’s kinda it — but not being able to organize matches or control who you might play against other than choosing from a few skill levels, it’s pretty disappointing. For Amiibo users, you can take your character into the online realm, which I assume works just fine (did not have one to test with).
In brief, there is a lot of things about Mario Tennis: Ultra Smash that didn’t do much for me. The graphics and presentation are very good, and the controls (I played on the Gamepad) are also a strong point, but good graphics and functional and responsive controls are to be expected. But beyond those fundamentals, the gameplay experience itself just doesn’t hold up for long. Being based on an already ‘fixed’ game like tennis doesn’t help, but, Ultra Smash doesn’t have enough content and extra creativity to give it any legs to stand on after just a scant few hours of play.
To the summary…