Tennis World Tour

Genre: Sports (Tennis)

Players: 1-2 Competitive (Local, Online)

.

Review:

Tennis World Tour is a Tennis game that tries to present players with something like a decent simulation of the sport, with a full-fledged campaign mode and a selection of real-world tennis stars to play (though in the campaign you’ll be creating your own player).

Right off the bat, I’ll say this game is ugly. The players look hideous, the court’s textures are simple, and the scenery is basic and unconvincing. The sound here also fails to capture the sounds of the game properly, with unconvincing vocalizations, generic commentary, and poor environmental noises. Also, I don’t know why, but the music kept skipping during the game’s inexplicably long loading screens. In every element of the presentation except perhaps animation, this game needed serious work (the animations, at least, are fairly decent and have some good personality to them).

The game’s campaign mode has some good ideas here, with players charged not only with winning games, but also maintaining their player’s training regimen and managing their funds. There are even bonus abilities you can unlock and assign to slots on your character in addition to customizing their individual stats. All told, it’s clear that this game made an effort to deliver a strong campaign.

The gameplay itself, however, is flawed in multiple ways. Your character’s movement is awkward, and at times they’ll refuse to budge, move too far, or automatically move toward the ball without you telling them to. What’s more, the aiming controls are extremely temperamental, with the game seemingly deciding at random whether or not your shot will be where you’re aiming it. Just the tiniest tilt on the control stick with perfect timing of a charged shot during a serve can still send the ball out of bounds, which is maddeningly frustrating. I actually swapped controllers just to check and make sure my game wasn’t being thrown off by drift (no such luck).

Also, and I don’t know where else to put this, for some reason this game doesn’t use traditional tennis scoring, and instead seems to be making every match a “first to ten” contest. Odd. Oh, and in terms of multiplayer, the game works about as well as could be expected locally, but the online servers are empty, so don’t expect to find any competition there.

Tennis World Tour has some lofty goals and its campaign mode has some good ideas, but it’s wrecked by a terrible presentation and broken, unreliable controls. While I credit publisher Bigben for not jacking up the price on the Switch version of the game like they’ve done with other games (it’s actually $20 less than the PlayStation 4 version), even at the discounted price of $30 this game isn’t worth it.

tl;dr – Tennis World Tour aims to be a simulation of the sport, and while it has a campaign mode with some interesting ideas, it’s done in by shoddy and unreliable gameplay and a horrible presentation. Oh, and the online lobby is a ghost town too. Largely a disappointment.

Grade: D+

^{You can support eShopperReviews on Patreon! Please click HERE to become a Sponsor!}