Top Spin Tennis Review
Top Spin Tennis makes great strides in the simulation of shot selection, but its automation of player movement negates this progress.
The Good
- Good shot choice
- Seven real-world players.
The Bad
- Slow gameplay
- Running is completely automated
- Shots take a long time to line up.
The quick-twitch action of tennis is hard to re-create on mobile devices, which lack analog control of any kind. Most games compensate by, to various degrees, automating shot selection and execution. Top Spin Tennis takes the opposite approach, delegating running control to the CPU. While you can press a button to switch your court position, you'll be concentrating on executing flawless swings. Jamdat has built its fortunes on timing-based gameplay, so it's not surprising that it's brought the console Top Spin's shot meter to the fore. The result is a game that's more deeply strategic than its competition but is ultimately less engaging.
Top Spin Tennis lets you play as one of seven leading athletes: four men and three women. Each of these star's skills are represented in three categories: strength, control, and stamina. There's been no diplomatic effort to balance the players. As a result, Brazil's Gustavo Kuerten is rightly rated higher than America's now-retired Michael Chang. In addition to the seven playable characters, you can compete against four invented stars, whose portraits are spooky black silhouettes.
To begin, you choose from the typical exhibition or ladder tournament modes. These are pretty similar, although in the latter you'll play many successive matches. The game lets you select from three difficulty modes. Most gamers will want to begin with the normal setting, as the default easy mode causes the artificially intelligent opponents to miss ground strokes too frequently. Although the tournament game type doesn't represent any particular event in the tennis world, it will take you to four courts from around the globe. These are surfaced in asphalt, grass, or clay, and the ball's bounce height and speed is affected accordingly.
To return a shot in Top Spin, you must press and hold one of nine shot buttons until your character is ready to connect with the ball. This takes a good long time, and it seems pretty stilted. The trick is to start your shot at the right moment so that the meter will fill to the median point before you release the button. Each player can execute three hard ground strokes, three drop shots, and three lobs. When you choose to advance toward the net, you'll automatically perform overhead volleys and smashes in place of your normal swings.
Refocusing the gameplay toward shot selection and preparation isn't necessarily the best way to simulate tennis. When playing tennis, you choose shots based on your court position relative to that of the ball, which is essentially an automatic action. Most of your energy is expended on moving into place. Anticipating, based on openings on the court, where your opponent will return the ball is the most exciting element of tennis. Shot placement and technique are equally important, but these are the reflections of a player's skill, and both are already statistically represented in Top Spin. If a developer can simulate only one element of tennis, movement is the most vital.
Audiovisually, Top Spin is average, by the standards of the Motorola v551. Players somewhat resemble their real-world counterparts, and the courts are appropriately colored based on their surface materials. The caveat is that the action moves pretty slowly, even on the "fast" gameplay setting. Top Spin plays a simple MIDI loop a few times over the opening menus, and during the game, you'll hear intermittent crowd applause--but no battle cries from the players.
Top Spin Tennis makes great strides in the simulation of shot selection, but its automation of player movement negates this progress. Despite Top Spin's inclusion of real-world talent, players will feel like they're missing the most important part of the tennis experience, and they'll be right.
- GameSpot Scorefair
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