Tennis Open 2020

Genre: Sports (Tennis)

Players: 1-2 Competitive (Local)

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Review:

Tennis Open 2020 is a game that presents the appearance of a serious simulation of the sport, aiming for a more realistic style and even seeming to promise real simulations of actual pros and courts. However, suffice it to say that it quickly becomes apparent that every element of this game is a facade.

First, the visuals here have some decent textures for the courts, a good overall resolution and framerate… but the players themselves are poorly detailed, with stiff animations, and the presentation as a whole feels lifeless and lacking in personality. And while the announcer and ball sounds are decent, the announcer has few lines and doesn’t name the players, the audience sounds canned, and the music (only in menus) is forgettable.

What’s more, those “career tennis players from all over the world” that the game touts are only referred to by first names, and depicted with blurry, non-distinct visuals. Could “Roger” be Roger Federer? The game undoubtedly wants you to think that, but I have the sinking suspicion that full names weren’t used here because the game’s creators couldn’t get the license to use them, so instead we have to settle for generic versions.

The gameplay here has players aiming the ball using the left stick, and this almost works okay, except this aiming feels really touchy, with the ball seeming to decide on a whim whether a shot aimed in any direction goes the way you want or wayyyy too far that way, as if you jammed the stick all the way in that direction.

What’s more, if you guessed that the odd choice of having left stick control the direction of the ball means that the right stick controls player movement, you’d be wrong. If you guess that players have no control over their movement whatsoever, congratulations! You win a cookie!

Players do have some capacity to improve the way their character controls by partaking in “training” minigames (all of which amount to “hit the ball in the highlighted square”). However, these minigames are tedious and pointless, and seem attached to an in-game money system that seems like it was designed for a game that pushed microtransactions (although no microtransactions are present in this game). Hmmmmmm… If you want to guess this game is a port from smartphones, congratulations! You win a cookie!

Oh, and I have to call out one other bit of false advertisement here: the game’s page on Nintendo.com claims “Natural moves of the player and precise hits (drop shots, lobs, slices, slams) give you that real tennis feeling!” Well, yes, you’ll be doing a lot of slices (on accident, hitting the ball out), but drop shots, lobs, and slams? No. You can choose a direction to aim the ball, including aiming it closer or farther away, but you have no ability to make these different kinds of shots.

If you got Tennis Open 2020 thinking it might be a decent simulation of the sport, you would be sorely disappointed. Between the soulless presentation, the lack of control, the generic names, and the clear indication that this game is a half-hearted mobile port, this is a game that only does enough to have the appearance of a more serious tennis game, but it’s far too lacking in too many areas to be worth your time.

tl;dr – Tennis Open 2020 is a game that has the appearance of a serious Tennis simulation, but the gameplay is shallow with limited control, the presentation only puts on the facade of a genuine simulation of the sport, and the terrible game structure is clearly designed around the microtransactions of the mobile game it was ported from. In short, don’t be fooled into getting this Tennis game.

Grade: D+

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