Instant Sports Tennis

Genre: Sports (Tennis)

Players: 1-4 Team Competitive (Local)

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Review:

Following up on 2019’s multi-sports game Instant Sports, developers Merge Games and BreakFirst returned to this family-friendly franchise in 2021 with Instant Sports Tennis, undoubtedly hoping that focusing on a single sport could give them better results than a multi-game package.

I must admit, I was somewhat wary of this game, having felt that the Tennis portion of Instant Sports was one of the weaker games in that package. However, to the developer’s credit, this time around things feel somewhat improved… though that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re great.

The presentation certainly hasn’t improved greatly – you’re still looking at simple 3D visuals with cartoony caricatures for characters, backed by forgettable music and a stilted-sounding announcer. While this game is colorful and may appeal to young kids, its overall ugly look won’t appeal to older players.

At the very least the gameplay this time works pretty well – there’s one control method using traditional gamepad controls, and two using gyroscopic motion controls… and two out of the three work quite well. The gamepad controls are decent, though very simple, and using the motion controls in conjunction with the analog stick for aiming works quite well. The second method using motion controls just does not work properly, though, trying to use the motion controls to both aim and shoot, and not doing either especially well. Wii Sports Tennis this ain’t, but the other control methods work well enough.

The only problem here is that this game is desperately lacking any sort of nuance. Beating the computer-controlled players is an extremely simple task, and players aren’t given enough fine control over their shot variety and aiming to make the multiplayer mode very engaging either. There are at least some nice minigames here to break up the action, but largely this feels like a shallow experience.

Credit where it’s due, the improved controls make this a much better game of Tennis than the version we saw in the multi-game instant Sports package, and both traditional and motion-controlled options are viable here, which is always nice to see. However, the gameplay is so shallow it’s hard to see anyone other than young children enjoying this game for very long.

tl;dr – Instant Sports Tennis is a family-friendly and cartoony Tennis game that offers players good options for both traditional controls as well as motion controls, and both options are pretty good. Unfortunately, the gameplay is otherwise extremely shallow, making this game hard to recommend to anyone other than young children.

Grade: C+

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