Super Tennis Blast

Genre: Sports (Tennis)

Players: 1-4 Team Competitive (Local)

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Review:

(Note: This game is included in the Super Sports Blast bundle along with Super Soccer Blast and Super Volley Blast.)

Super Tennis Blast is a family-friendly Tennis game released on multiple platforms in 2019, including Nintendo Switch. This game is the second title in developer Unfinished Pixel’s “Blast” line of sports games, after Super Volley Blast.

The presentation in this game is mostly very good, albeit with one major caveat. The game uses simple, colorful, slightly-cartoony 3D visuals that vaguely resemble Nintendo’s Miis, as well as some simple, colorful slightly-cartoony courts to match. This is paired with forgettable menu music that sounds sorta’ like elevator music, and a court that’s silent save for the noises of the ball, announcer, and the crod’s applause. It’s not in any way impressive, but it looks and sounds pleasant enough, except one problem – the animation, which is terrible, choppy, and frankly just ugly.

However, the gameplay here is another matter entirely. Simply put, this game manages to pin down controls and physics that are just right for a tennis game, as well as providing a good tutorial that even shows you how they work by showing players a cursor indicating how their shot moves when shifting the aim (why don’t more tennis games do this!?). What results is some of the best tennis gameplay I’ve seen in the genre at least since the days of Sega’s Virtua Tennis series.

What’s more, this game adds a hefty amount of content. There’s a career mode where players can build a character through a campaign, various modifiers so players can add in various wacky elements into a standard game of tennis, tennis minigames, and support for 2-on-2 local multiplayer. For those wondering, no, this game does not support motion control or touchscreen, and there’s sadly no online play. However, if traditional gamepad controls are acceptable to you, I think you’ll be pleased with what this game has to offer.

While Super Tennis Blast definitely has a few areas where it could do with improvement, overall this is an excellent game of Tennis and fans of the sport would do well to give it a try. Unless you need motion control in a tennis game, require online play, or take issue with the game’s ugly, choppy animation, this is a fantastic version of the sport with great gameplay and lots of content and options. And while it may not look anywhere remotely as good as Mario Tennis Aces, it certainly plays better.

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tl;dr – Super Tennis Blast is a family-friendly, slightly-cartoony tennis game with wonderful gameplay and plenty of great content and options. The visuals are simple, the animation is ugly, and the game lacks motion controls and online play, but everything else is so top-notch that those flaws are easily forgiven. Without a doubt one of the best Tennis games on the Nintendo Switch.

Grade: B+

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