Mario Tennis: Ultra Smash (2015)

Mario Tennis: Ultra Smash brings a few new tweaks to Mario Tennis while also taking a step back for the series as a whole.

The game is absolutely breath-taking, with crisp visuals and bright colours that pop. Each hit feels real, the sound effects bristle and add to the intensity of the matches and make for exciting volleys and matches.

What makes this game feel as if it comes up short is that it feels so barebones and even underdeveloped in terms of features. It offers a standard exhibition mode which can use simple rules or a context sensitive system, a mushroom mode in which your character will grow in size at certain intervals to gain extra power to smash your opponents into oblivion, a few minigames of zero importance and an endurance mode where you battle through opponents.

There is no tournament mode. Compared to the N64 version I played as a kid the game adds nothing too new and feels so lacklustre it's heartbreaking to play the game, having expected to re-live the magic of Mario Tennis. An online mode is added to the fray but doesn't fill the void. It just feels like an incredible oversight. Add the fact that the unlockables can be unlocked within a few hours through a coin system which doesn't feel as if it takes unlock time into consideration (You can get 2-3 thousand coins after an exhibition match of average length and unlockables start at 5 thousand coins) and the game doesn't record your stats (a feature I loved in Mario Tennis 64 as it allowed you to create virtual goals) and the game feels like a quick cash grab before Nintendo moved on. Indeed, the game came out just before Christmas and Aces seems to re-use a lot of its assets.

Overall the game is underwhelming. I won't deny it is an absolute blast with friends and the Gamepad is utilised excellently to provide two screens for 1v1. The graphics are wonderful, cartoony and blistering with colour but the game itself just feels lacking in features.