There's a few good changes, a few bad ones, but it's Virtua Tennis as usual.
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Pros:
+ More Fluid: It's a pretty subtle change, but the movements and transitions between shots seem a lot more fluid and natural than those of VT2, making for a much more engaging experience.
+ More Mini-Games: Perhaps there's a bit more than necessary, and they vary wildly in difficulty, but there's something like double the amount of Mini-Games there were in VT2, ensuring there'll be some means of enjoyably raising your stats. One problem though: no more Tank Attack! How could they lose the best one?
+ Still Addictive / Silly: It's still Virtua Tennis - the tennis is about as realistic as pong, but you get some outrageously fun, ridiculous rallies as a result.
Cons:
- Unfair Difficult Hikes: While the game will be pretty smooth sailing for most veterans of VT2, when you hit the highest difficulties, it becomes unreasonably hard. It's bad enough that they clearly know exactly what you're doing before you've actually done it - having them be able to hit shots much more powerfully on the run or from awkward positions than you can technically do is too far. Also, the Academy challenges become completely, utterly, hopelessly impossible towards the end!
- Dives: Seeing a tennis player dive in real life is quite a novel and exciting thing, but trust me, you'll be utterly sick of it after 5 minutes playing VT3! Your player will dive if the ball is even slightly hard to reach, throwing up a soft reply and taking ages to recover, basically ruining your chances of winning the point - only doing this for the genuinely out-of-reach stuff would have been much better, rather than wasting it on shots you could have easily just stretched for.
- No Dual Career: A nice feature of VT2 was that you got to simultaneously follow one male and one female career at the same time, ultimately culminating in a mixed-doubles showdown with the best players in the game - now you can only do one at a time, which is a shame.
- Dodgy Emails / Coach: The emails you get from fans and other players are hideously poor and pointless - those from your coach are the lowlight, offering such hilariously bad 'insight' as to drive you out of tennis for good!
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Ultimately, it's hard for me to know what to say about this - it's just Virtua Tennis, pure and simple. In general you could say it's better thanks to the improved fluidity of the experience, but I've still marked it down thanks to the unbearable diving and complete lack of innovation. Still, if you see it cheap, I recommend giving it a go!