Top Spin is a pretty good tennis game. It definitely fills a big void that hasn’t gotten much attention this generation. However, it also has many flaws, which bring it down, especially considering it’s a first party title that consequently should have gotten extra loving care. The strengths lie in the overall design of the game. The career mode is excellent. Being able to create your own character, with his or her own physical design, is the first positive. The create-a-player engine is as good as it can get other than the lack of ability to modify their eyes. Taking your character through career mode, you get to buy training, win tournaments, and buy more clothes. Progressing leads to the ability to personalize your character’s masteries and skills, which leads to great personalization and also allows for a lot of replay value as you can create many different kinds of characters. After you’ve created your character, you get to go to the meat of the game, competing on XBL. In exhibition, you can use the preset characters or use your own characters created in career mode, but in official games you have to use one of your own created characters. I really like how you get to overcome opponents with not only your personal playing skill, but also the choices you made in creating your character. This game also has XSN support, and a detailed ranking system. It’s definitely a top notch layout. The negatives of Top Spin come in the details. For starters, this game is very difficult to play. When I first played against human opponents, I thought the learning curve was pretty good. However, after playing the computer in career mode Grand Slams, I do have several complaints. For one thing, my characters tend to fall down way too often when hitting the ball. Also, sometimes when I press a button to hit the ball, they won’t respond. They’ll just sit perfectly still and watch the ball pass by 1 foot to their right. The latter isn’t overly common, though, fortunately. Finally, it’s nigh impossible to get my character to hit the ball hard, especially when on the net. They just lightly tap the ball (allowing the opponent to kill them) instead of pounding it, and I don’t understand why. Also, the computer AI seems to depend on “cheating” to create a challenge. Very often, the AI opponent will hit the ball FAR out of bounds, but it won’t count as out of bounds. This eliminates a huge bit of strategy as its unsafe to let the ball go out of bounds (although it does “officially” go out of bounds about 50% of the time). Furthermore, the AI opponents’ are able to defy physics. I’ve seen their shots turn 45+ degrees in midair. I understand that spin allows the ball to curve somewhat, but their shots defy physics and are ludicrous. There are also some problems in the XBL features, which I hope are remedied with a patch. The rankings (all 4) do not list correctly when you do “Show Friends only”. There is no way to page a Friend who’s online without creating a game and asking them to join. Finally, there’s no way to play doubles with a partner through XBL. You can play doubles over XBL, but your partner must be using the same Xbox. A few more things that bothered me, especially considering this is a first party game who should know the hardware better than anyone, were the sound and loading times. This game doesn’t seem to take advantage of the hard-drive at all, and has very frequent, very long loading times which are a constant annoyance. Also, the game has a very bland, weak soundtrack without custom soundtrack support. Overall, I really like this game, but unfortunately I think starvation for a good tennis game artificially enhanced my initial impressions. It’s a good game, but the gameplay problems, especially, are unforgiving. It seems like it was rushed out early, with the bugs in the rankings, and with the poor load times and soundtrack. Overall, I would definitely recommend getting it if you like tennis, but I’d also recommend replacing it with the next tennis game to hit this generation.
By dsplayer1010 | Review Date: Feb 10, 2007 | XBOX
i got thi and ncaa 2005 as a pack-in when i got my xbox. and i was surprised how good it was. now im not a diehard, or even casuual tennis fan, ( i can name like 1 player, but he retired,) but this is really fun and addi... Read Full Review
I have never been a real fan of tennis but I thought I would give this game a try as it was in the bargain bin of my local store. I loaded it up and was at first impressed with the quality of the graphics. The animati... Read Full Review
