Full Review Mario Tennis Open for Nintendo 3DS

Mario Tennis Open review

Mario Tennis Open is a fun and frantic tennis game, let down by a lack of content and challenge.

Format: Nintendo 3DS
Developer: Camelot
Publisher: Nintendo
Released: Out now

You do have to wonder why it's been seven years since the last proper new entry into the Mario Tennis. The Wii seemed perfectly equipped for some motion-plus flavoured tennis, particularly after the success of both Mario Kart and Mario Super Strikers on the platform. But aside from the New Play Control update of the GameCube's Mario Power Tennis, it wasn't to be. So it's with some intrigue that the series attempted revival is on the R4i Nintendo 3DS. It's a mixed return; fast-paced tennis with chunky flair, let down by curious balancing issues and a lack of content.

The on-court action is bright, breezy and constructed with the expected assuredness. Nintendo games --particularly ones with the red-capped plumber-- have the enviable knack of making simple movement a pleasure. Mario Tennis Open is no different, with the familiar cast of characters patrolling the court with a delightful charm, with Mario lolloping in his trademark blend of tubby awkwardness and skilful grace, while Bowser stomps and Boo whizzes.

There's a pleasing sense of inertia as the ball fizzes back and forth and, of course, Mario Tennis favours cartoon knockabout action rather than anything approaching simulation. The shots are assigned to both the face buttons or the bottom touch-screen (though, curiously, these layouts do not match up) and control is a doddle. Nintendo, ever mindful of accessibility and making use of their own hardware, have also included a motion control setup. Movement is taken care of by the game (you can interrupt by using the circle pad, though the pull of the AI and your own inputs can often clash), you aim by tilting the console, and choose the type of shot on the touchscreen. It's a welcoming, if inevitably shallow setup and its over-the-shoulder viewpoint is arguably the only area where Mario Tennis Open makes good use of the console's 3D screen.

Most players will likely favour the circle pad and buttons setup, which offers more precision and reward. The key elements of the game's tennis are the 'chance shots', where a colour coded circle pops up on court. Manoeuvre your player into the circle and select the right shot and you will execute a super-powered return, taking on the traits of the shot type and enhancing them. Step into the blue circle and pull off a slice, and the ball will banana viciously around the court, a lob will pirouette high into the air and land in the back court with unpredictable spin. A top-spin shot explodes in a fireball of power.

The chance shots are both the game's biggest draw and biggest drawback. In human competition, hammering the ball back and forth with these fizzing returns is the game at its most exciting. Moving into position, setting up a topspin chance shot, only to bluff your opponent and drop the ball lightly over the net adds a nice layer of tactics, particularly when each chance shot can be countered. However, the computer AI doesn't engage in such interesting back and forths. Early games in the Tour mode --Mario Tennis Open's main single-player campaign-- are a tedious waltz through inept opponents. Matches are over in a handful of shots, split-second rallies finished the moment you initiate a chance shot. Eight brief tournaments and a hour or two later and you still are unlikely to have dropped many points, let alone lost a game. And it's all just a bit ... dull.

R4i 1.4.4

€ 24,99

But then you unlock Pro mode, and things start to look up. Rallies last longer and chance shots are no longer the instant win they once were, though the purple smash shots remain over-powered. You're now thinking more about positioning and mixing up your shot choice, and it's far more enjoyable using the chance shots as a wider tactic than an instant win button.

But then it's over, and all too brief foray not helped by the fact there's very little sense of progression. You can use your Mii and build up skills, but it's dealt with in a curiously obtuse manner. And, simply put, playing as a Mii isn't nearly as fun as using Mario and chums. You can also unlock new costumes and equipment for your Mii, but it's largely --admittedly very cute-- window dressing. There's just not quite enough to the tennis to hold the attention through the foibles, the core play is chunky and fun, but it's let down by a lack of variety that is usually the hallmark of Mario sports games. There is, for instance, only one gimmick court throughout the career, where the surface cycles from point to point including a vortex that sends balls spiralling off at impossible angles. In Mario Power Tennis, there were all manner of interesting courts. Here, the gimmicks are left to a small selection of fairly limp minigames. There is one standout, however, called Super Mario Tennis. You play through levels of classic Super Mario Bros. hitting the ball against a screen to collect coins, bash blocks and stomp Goombas in lieu of Mario himself. It's too fiddly to be an unqualified success, but it shows a dash of playful inventiveness that seems to be missing from the rest of the game.

It's a real shame that, especially for a handheld game, the singleplayer portion of Mario Tennis Open doesn't stack up as well as it should. Thankfully, playing against human competition is great fun. Nintendo smartly allows local four player action using one cartridge and online play is robust and lag-free. Again, though, the offering beyond one-off exhibitions in multiplayer is incredibly thin, reduced to persistent online records and leaderboards.

Filled out and more expertly balanced, Mario Tennis Open could have been a winner. The tennis itself offers undeniable gratification in its joyful movement and colourful character, but it's disappointing it then isn't given the stage to truly shine.

The most hardcore RPG on Nintendo consoles - Dragon's Dogma

Capcom delivers a hardcore, rewarding, and authentic role-playing experience

There's no sense of danger in modern games. Dying has become a minor setback rather than something to be feared. That's why Dragon's Dogma is so inspiring. Its enormous world is rife with danger, and death lurks around every corner. It's an adventure in the truest sense of the word, rich with mystery and peril.

On the surface, it's a fairly bland fantasy setting. Capcom have taken their visuals cues from a litany of Western fantasynovels and films. But thebrown, uninspiring environments betray a game of remarkable imagination.

Broadly speaking, the game is reminiscent of the Elder Scrolls series. It presents an open world filled with towns, cities, NPCs, quests, shops, dungeons, caves, forests, and everything else you might expect from an RPG.

The third-person combat occurs in real-time, and varies depending on your class. It has a satisfying weight and physicality to it, which has led some to compare it to Dark Souls - although it's not quite as brutally precise. You can attack from afar with a bow and arrow as a Strider, wade in with a sword and shield as a Fighter, or hurl spells as a Mage.

It's a fairly standard RPG class system, but the biggest innovation, and the real core of the combat, is the pawn system. Pawns are magical, sentient creatures that are human in appearance, but exist only to serve as hired mercenaries for a hero known as the Arisen.

Every generation, a dragon arrives in the land of Gransys, bringing with it a scourge of terrible monsters. These creatures roam the countryside, terrorising and killing the locals. But whenever there's a dragon, there also appears an Arisen: a hero destined to drive the beast back to whence it came. Naturally, you are the Arisen, and your arrival has stirred the pawns to life, who are sworn to help you defeat the dragon.

R4i 1.4.4

€ 24,99 

What's really interesting about the pawns is that there are an infinite amount of them - either randomly generated by the game, or downloaded from the internet. In most RPGs you form your party from a selection of NPCs, but in Dragon's Dogma you create it yourself.

TRIPPING THE RIFT

Using a Rift Stone, which you can find in most towns and cities, you access a slick interface that allows you to browse through a vast archive of pawns, many of which (providing your console is connected to the internet) are creations of other players. When we reviewed the game, the servers were full of pawns with Japanese names: presumably belonging to the development team. When the game is released there'll be many, many more to choose from, which is an exciting prospect.

Say you need a healer. You can search through a list of Mages, studying their stats and abilities to see whether they're right for your party. Some may specialise in offensive magic, while others are tuned for support and healing; there are limitless combinations, and you have to make sure you have the right team for each quest. Pawns don't level up, so as the Arisen's skills improve, you have to constantly change up and reshape your team. They're designed to be expendable.

You can hire two pawns at atime, in addition to one main pawn that you create yourself from scratch, and who travels with you for the entirety of the game. Ours is a tall, blonde, pointy-eared Strider named Anna, who's a mean shot with abow. Once created, other players will be able to download her, earning us in-game items and currency. Capcom even say we'll be able to share our pawns on Facebook, although we were unable to test this.

As you fight, your pawns are incredibly vocal, yelling out strategies and suggestions that are genuinely useful. In fact, listening to your pawns is vitally important to surviving the game's many tough boss encounters and dungeons. It's not the usual stock dialogue of an RPG party; the stuff they say is actually important.

R4i Nintendo 3ds

€ 20,90

As the hero, you don't have to be on the front line: you can easily play as a support character (a healer or archer, for instance) and let your pawns do all the heavy hitting. You can also use the d-pad to issue basic commands, like shouting for aid,or telling your party to charge the enemy. It's basic, but it works well.

Pawns get an experience rating, both for quests and enemy types. So if you're struggling with a boss, downloading a pawn who has already encountered it (in another player's game) will reveal specific weaknesses. "I've met this creature before! Strike it with fire!" they'll yell. It's an incredibly clever use of internet connectivity, and feels like an evolution of the similarly imaginative message-leaving system from Dark Souls.

The quests themselves aren't quite as inventive as the combat system. They're all variations on a limited pool of mission types: fetching items, escorting NPCs, clearing dungeons. Nothing here stands out as especially imaginative or original.

ON A MISSION

Your pawns, who have unique, spoken dialogue for almost everything you come across in the game world, keep things entertaining, but big, thrilling moments - like battling a flying monster atop a castle during a raging storm - could have been more frequent.

It does have a great sense of humour, though. For all its Western stylings, there's still plenty of the quirk and insanity that defines Japanese games. You can pick up any NPC, including your own pawns, and throw them. One mission sees you chasing a fleet-footed burglar through a city at night. A specific type of enemy goes into a wild frenzy whenever it sees a female character. In another mission you have to dress your male pawns (and yourself if you're a guy) in ladies' clothes to infiltrate a camp of all-female bandits. It's absolutely mental.

It's the challenge that makes Dragon's Dogma special. It's an incredibly ruthless game, and never tells you if an area, enemy, or quest, is too tough for you: you have to find out for yourself, which usually ends in an unceremonious death. But there'sa great satisfaction in getting utterly trounced by a boss, only to return when you're a few levels stronger and totally destroy it.

There's something weirdly intoxicating about this constant fear of dying. When you venture into a new area of the map, you're filled with trepidation about what beasties may be lurking in the bushes, but will be compelled to keep going. Your curiosity and desire to discover loot, or a path to a new area, or a quest, makes you risk everything by venturing into dangerous, uncharted territory. Like we said earlier: it's an adventure.

HARD AS NAILS

This makes Dragon's Dogma one of the most hardcore, rewarding, and authentic role-playing experiences on Nintendo DSi XL consoles. But the difficulty can be obstructive at times, and we found ourselves regularly quitting in frustration.

There's a distinct lack of direction, and you'll often waste your time trekking halfway across the map, only to discover the quest you're on is at too high a level for your party to handle.

So while the utterly merciless difficulty and lack of signposting does make the game tense and unpredictable, it can also be massively annoying. How this affects you depends entirely on your temperament as a gamer. Ifyou want quick thrills and (relatively) easy accessibility, stick to Skyrim.