Review: Top Spin 2 for Xbox 360 on GamePro.com.

Review: Top Spin 2

Review by JohnnyK | 03/29/2006 | 13:53:28 PM PST

While Top Spin 2 might find its way in to the Xbox 360s of tennis fans, those hardcore players out there may want to call a double fault on this one.

So, I'm a huge fan of tennis, both watching and playing. It's not every day that a new tennis game comes out, so I was more than thrilled to get a review build of Top Spin 2 in my hands a few days ago. I was a pretty big fan of the first Top Spin on the Xbox, and while it was far from perfect, it gave me a pretty good dose of the tennis action that I so desperately thirsted for. With the title now under a new publisher (2K Sports) and on a new console (the Xbox 360), I was ready for my next-gen tennis dreams to come true.

Dreams In To Nightmares
While you can play as a number of superstars in standard Exhibition matches, the real Top Spin 2 experience comes in the lengthy Career Mode. You get to create your own unique player (male or female) from the ground up, including physical look and attributes. Once created you set off on the road to tennis success. Actually, you begin as the 200th ranked player in the world and through constant training and tournament play, you'll climb the world rankings, gain access to prestigious Grand Slam events, and hopefully become the top player in the world. The premise of taking your lowly scrub to super stardom isn't new and frankly works pretty well in terms of player creation and options.

Since you are the 200th ranked player in the world, you're not going to be able to just walk on to Rod Laver Arena at the Australian Open and claim your prize money. About half of the time you're on the court is dedicated to training exercises to boost your various skills, such as speed, power, serve, backhand, forehand, and more subtle skills such as precision and reflexes. The more successful you are in the exercises, the more you can upgrade your player with special stars that signify your proficiency in that particular area of expertise. There is a catch however, in the fact that your player can only have 60 skill stars total, meaning you'll need to pick and choose which particular areas of skill you want to focus on. That idea behind the upgrading is pretty standard, at least for tennis games. You'll probably recognize bits and pieces of it from other games in the past, but despite the cribbing from those titles, the system works fairly well. You're essentially given the freedom to create your own unique player, whether he or she is dedicated to power play or finesse and speed.

As you play through the exercises they become more and more difficult, in a way to make you really work for those skill stars. It's just too bad that this system ultimately ends up backfiring in something that I like to call "Virtua Tennis Syndrome." That tennis title featured a very similar skill training system by having you play through mini-games to increase your abilities. But, just like in Virtua Tennis, the later skill challenges ramp up in difficulty so drastically as to make them sometimes seemingly impossible. The object of training, at least in real tennis, is to hone one's skills and grow as a player. In Top Spin 2, training seems more like punishment.

Your Rules Mean Nothing
When you're not training away your life, you'll find yourself entering various tournaments to win money and up your ranking. Since you start off on the bottom of the tennis food chain, you'll spend most of your early play in minor level tournaments against similarly ranked players. Minor tournaments usually last only a couple of rounds, so early on you shouldn't have too much trouble getting a few wins under your belt and climbing the rankings ladder. Despite the ease of entering tournaments and upping your rank, I found it incredibly frustrating to see that the game really doesn't seem to follow any sort of logical path when it comes to the latter. For example, I won a few tournaments and got my rank up to around 45th in the world. My stats were equally impressive and during minor tournaments I could pretty much bully any opponent I went up against. Considering that major tournaments only come around every so often, I spent most of my time cleaning house during these less than stellar events. But, as expected, I eventually got bored with all the ass-kicking that I was doing.

Before and during a match, you have the option of simulating either a game or set to save yourself some time. When up against a player ranked 185th in the world, I opted for the easy way out. After all, I was superior to him in both rank and ability -it should be an easy win, right? Wrong. I ended up losing the 2-set match 3-0, 3-0. As a result, I dropped about 105 spots on the world ranking. While incredibly annoying, I simply chocked up my loss to cockiness -- I evidently needed more training. After a training exercise, however, I was completely floored by the fact that after its completion, I suddenly jumped up 26 spots in the ranks. The last time I checked, you actually needed to play competitive tennis to increase your world ranking, if not, the likes of Roger Federer and Lindsay Davenport would simply train 99.9% of the year and show up for only Grand Slam events. Real world tennis rankings follow a complex formula that take in to account things like tournament success, wins, and play frequency. If Serena Williams is ranked 10th in the world but gets hurt and has to sit out for 6 months, she does NOT climb any higher than number 10, no matter how much training she may have during the interim. For a game trying to give a realistic tennis experience, the ranking and simulation system is downright embarassing.

Pretty With No Substance
With much of the gameplay aspects of Top Spin 2 falling on the disappointing side, hopefully the visuals could sway me more towards greener pastures. Close up, the visuals in Top Spin 2 are pretty detailed. Character models are fairly detailed and animations for things like racketing swinging and even sliding on clay surfaces are well rendered. Unfortunately it's the camera that really ends up throwing a wrench in to the works, with only two options available. The first, Far, leaves the camera a good distance away from the court, giving you ample view of the entire playing surface and both players. But, when in Far, you can't set the game to always display your player at the bottom of the screen, which is a staple of tennis video games. If you choose the aptly named Zoom camera, you get a close up view of the action behind your player, but this perspective effectively cuts off half of your court, making some shots almost impossible to get to. So, you're essentially stuck with two camera modes, where neither one is truly enjoyable, which is a big shame.

The game's sound department doesn't chip in much to the overall experience either, with little more than some generic music during training and the occasional grunt or "fwop" sound of a ball hitting the ground. Continuing a strange and regrettable trend, the game features absolutely no audio commentary during play. While every other sports game on the planet feature some sort of color commentary, Top Spin 2 decides to forego this feature. It's just too bad that some nice in-game commenting could have really spiced things up.

Double Fault
I wanted Top Spin 2 to be the best tennis game ever made - I really did. And, I have to admit, it does have some nice features going for it, namely a deep Career mode and a fine stable of top players (although it also includes a nice mix of nobodies). These positives, however, are seriously outweighed by the negatives. While I'm sure Top Spin 2 will find its way in to the Xbox 360s of tennis fans, those hardcore players out there may want to call a double fault on this one.