Difficulty:

Hard

Time Spent:

100 or More Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Amazing"

There is a gradient of developmental complexity when it comes to sports video games.

Take a big team sport such as American football or world football (soccer) for example. The developer needs to coordinate eleven players per side– each with their own A.I. rules. Sports of the motor variety are equally complex, as multiple cars must transfer their physical properties to the road surface, and sometimes to each other via the crash dynamic.
Tennis, on the other hand, is quite a bit easier than most sports games from a development standpoint (these games are by no means easy to create, however). The rule set only varies between singles and doubles matches, which means there are always four players or less on the field of play per match. They're separated by a net to-boot; no character hit detection to speak of. There are limited shot types in tennis as well, especially when compared to a solo sport such as golf. And keep in mind the utensil in tennis does not change per shot like it does when taking to the links.
2K Sports and PAM Development have been entertaining us with tennis games for over five years now. The original Top Spin was head-and-shoulders above any other video game tennis game, period. Instead of making a follow-up to Top Spin for the soon-to-be-extinct Xbox, PAM and 2K waited until the Xbox 360 to unveil Top Spin 2. TS2 ended up as a fairly competent tennis simulator, but it didn't quite deliver the punch that the original game did back in 2003