by:	April 10, 2004

More than all others, tennis is the sport that I can play in real life, and play well. As such, it is the game for which I’ve wanted to find a good video game simulation, but I’ve also had higher standards. Games like Virtua Tennis and Mario Tennis came along and were well received by others, but I was looking for more. Top Spin may well be the best tennis game yet in some aspects, but it misses on too many points to be great.

Tennis is a wonderful sport that combines speed and power with precision and touch. There are tactics like serve and volley or baseline rallies. There is so much variety inherent in the game that it is hard to capture. Top Spin has the basics that have been around for a while in video game tennis: there is the flat shot which is deemed the safe shot (a gross misstatement, as anyone who plays the game will tell you), there are the two spins, topspin and slice, and there are lobs. The new shots added in Top Spin that were not represented well in previous tennis games are the drop shot, which is a important thing to add, and the spoon serve, which is rather unimportant. Top Spin also includes a risk shot and serve, which provides great power but as the name hints, great risk as well. Sadly, the meter system used for both the risk shots and the soft shots is overly complicated for use during a set or match point, rendering them useless.

Those slice and topspin shots I discussed earlier are also useless. They can go out, unlike the safe shot, as the game considers them risky. Therefore, they don’t really contribute towards winning a point in a way that a safe shot wouldn't do equally well. In real life, the slice and topspin shots are used for control, while the flat shot is the more powerful and risky shot used to put the ball away. In the end, the safe shot and the lob are the two shots that will be most useful while playing Top Spin. Like most tennis games that have come before it, Top Spin turns into a fairly predictable sequence of crosscourt rallies until a player can’t get to the ball. The various shots are just too roughly implemented to mirror the more interesting strategy the game offers in real life.

The single player career mode makes up the bulk of the game’s depth, as you create a player and then take him or her from the bottom of the ranking all the way to first rank and legend status. This process is poorly structured, as you simply move around the globe playing in any of the tournaments you’ve unlocked, fulfilling the easy and repetitive sponsor challenges, and upgrading your skills at training points. What was needed was a yearly schedule to simulate a tour, much like what Virtua Tennis offered. This would be more realistic and more interesting. As it is, you can accomplish all the goals except finishing all the tournaments within 5 hours, with much left undone. Especially weak is the limit on training allowed, which prevents you from trying out all of the drills. It would have been better if they let you do the drills even if you would no longer gain attributes from doing so.