Tennis World Tour

Until recently, tennis was the forgotten child of the sports genre in gaming. A few years ago games such as the excellent Top Spin Tennis series graced the gaming landscape but since 2011’s excellent Top Spin 4 the genre has had a somewhat barren spell. This year, however, saw the arrival of AO Tennis at the start of the year and now Tennis World Tour (TWT). With the developers, Breakpoint, including many who worked on Top Spin 4, confidence was understandably high that we would have a spiritual successor to Top Spin 4 in all but name. Confidence is one thing, but like so many things in life, what looks good on paper doesn’t always turn out as you’d expect.

On booting up TWT for the first time I was greeted with a nicely laid out menu system but one which was devoid of things to do. Multiplayer was and still is, disabled. There’s no local co-op or versus mode as doubles are yet to make an appearance. My only options were an exhibition match, practice or career mode. Given this was my first foray in a tennis game for quite some time the practice mode seemed like the most logical choice to get a handle on things. It was, as you’d expect, a rather straightforward affair with mini-games and tutorials explaining how to apply different spin on the ball which are mapped to the X, Y, A & B buttons along with guidance advising the longer you hold them the more powerful, but more inaccurate, your shots will be. The left thumbstick not only controls your player but also your intended shot direction. Serving has the usual two modes, pressing a button serves up an easily returnable serve for your opponent, hold it down and using the left thumbstick allows you to do a more precise serve but one that’s prone to error. It’s all very simple and very quick to pick up and once I got through a few practice modes I felt confident enough to take on a full match against an AI opponent.

Tennis is a fast-paced game reliant on reaction, planning and execution. You need to play three or four shots ahead of what you’re doing now to set your opponent up to allow you to score a point. It was true in 1972’s Pong and has been essential in almost every rendition of tennis in the gaming world. It’s a shame then to report that TWT’s gameplay, as it is now, is woeful. It’s playable but it is so clunky and, at times, so unresponsive, it sucks any life out of the match you’re playing. Couple that with repetitive commentary from the one and only John McEnroe and you end up in a weird position where you want to finish the game so it’s over but wanting to play more because it’s one of the few tennis game we have this generation. What’s even more difficult is pinpointing exactly what makes playing a game so frustrating. After much deliberation I came to the conclusion that the lacklustre, bordering on unresponsive controls, was where TWT’s biggest issue lied.

I used the word intended deliberately when I was talking about what the left thumbstick did as often, despite being in the right body position and stance to, for example, play the ball cross-court, the game decides that I’d much prefer to play it back the other way where my opponent gleefully accepts my gift and promptly dispatches it past my flailing player for an easy point. This happens frequently and often to the point where I had absolutely no idea whether or not my play was going to follow my instructions. It makes planning your approach to a match almost impossible and no matter how much I tried to adapt my way of playing I could never truly be confident that I was going to get the shot I wanted. Speaking of flailing players, it seems that the animation for running and playing shots don’t like each other very much. I’ve lost count of the number of points I’ve missed because the game doesn’t think I’m anywhere near the ball because my player is still in their running animation and hasn’t stopped long enough to start the one to set up a shot. I appreciate that the shot might be awful but if it’s within touching distance why can’t I hit it? Then there’s the frequent stuttering before serves and a pre-serve animation that you can’t skip which seems to take forever to finish. All of this becomes even more frustrating when you start up career mode (pretty much the only thing worth doing given there’s no multiplayer) as it’s actually pretty good.

You start at rank #99 and it’s up to you to climb up the ladder to eventually be the best in the world. Along the way, you have to pick whether to enter a tournament, play an exhibition match, train or rest. Resting is in there is you have to manage your player’s stamina. Do too much and performance will suffer and the likelihood of injuries will increase. It’s a pretty cool feature and genuinely makes you think about what you want to do next. There are also perks that you can assign to your player which require certain conditions be met before they activate. They also have a limited lifespan but can help your player and increase the amount of XP you earn which, like any good RPG, you use to increase your player’s stats. I like what this adds to the career mode and makes it more distinct than what’s existed in the career modes of its forebears. It really is a shame that the gameplay that goes along with it isn’t as polished or as interesting.

Aside from the gameplay, what surrounds it (the sounds and the look) are equally as disappointing. TWT isn’t exactly ugly but the character creation is severely limited with little wiggle room and, with a lack of licensed players, no creation tools to forge your own lookalikes. Stadiums do look pretty good but there’s no sliding on clay courts and other such touches that make the world you’re playing in that more believable. I’ve already mentioned the iffy gameplay but I also came across a rather annoying bug in the form of a minuscule scorecard between sets (pictured below). It’s not huge I grant you but to me it summed things up rather well, with TWT missing the little things and having minor but irritating bugs that when are added up equal a hugely disappointing experience. Even the crowds in TWT reflect the, seemingly, lack of polish as they rarely react to anything going on in front of them, often sounding as if they’re watching the match on the next court or this weeks episode of Love Island. Smash an excellent forehand? Deathly silence. Hit an average return for a point, they go wild with McEnroe exclaiming the your player is hitting bombs. It’s just so jarring and disjointed that it removes pretty much any and all atmosphere.

When you add to the mix the lack of multiplayer and doubles in any form you suddenly realise just how much is missing and how little there is to do in TWT. Sure the career mode is pretty good but it is hampered, heavily, by the mediocre gameplay and woeful controls. Recently I picked up Rockstar’s Table Tennis on backwards compatibility and it’s just as excellent now as it was then and I wondered why that is and why a new game, backed by experienced developers who have given us one of the all time great tennis games in Top Spin 4 could deliver such a drab game. It then dawned on me, after a forty-odd hit rally against Jesper, that it was all down to focus. Rockstar’s Table Tennis focused on the game, the match, the thing that makes table tennis what it is and what makes it exciting to watch. TWT on the other hand, perhaps feeling the pressure of having to deliver something as good as Top Spin but with modern touches that gamers expect like a decent career mode, lost sight of what makes tennis, tennis.

All up TWT is a massive disappointment doubly so when you consider that some members of the team brought us the spectacular Top Spin 4. I appreciate that every games’ development is different with the process, decisions and direction causing things to turn out different than imagined but I’d be surprised if what they’ve delivered was anything like what they hoped and imagined when they decided to make a new tennis game. It’s possible that some of the graphical and gameplay glitches could be patched going forward and maybe, soon, multiplayer will be enabled but realistically the former will have to come before the latter and by the time everything’s fixed to the point of it being enjoyable I wonder just how many people will have persevered. Some believe sports games to be one of the easiest games to develop and difficult to get wrong and then something like TWT comes around and proves that even something as straightforward as tennis can go awry.