Tennis Club Story

Genre: Management Simulation

Players: 1

.

Review:

Without a doubt the most prolific developer and publisher of Management Simulation games on Nintendo Switch is Kairosoft, who specializes in games with a retro-style isometric pixel art style, often with the word “Story” in the title. As of this writing, Kairosoft has released 60 games on Nintendo Switch, most of them Management Simulations.

After their earlier games, Kairosoft had established a few templates for their Simulation games that later games would largely follow. Game Dev Story established a Simulation-style game more focused on managing employee time and focus, Hot Springs Story established a Simulation style in line with Theme Park Simulators where you try to cater to guests’ tastes to maximize attendance and income, and Epic Astro Story established a Simulation style akin to games like Sim City, where you’re building out a town or settlement.

Tennis Club Story originally released on mobile devices in 2016, then saw a port to Nintendo Switch in 2020, then to PlayStation 4 in 2021, PC in 2022 and to Xbox One in 2024. And this game’s closest analogue to prior Kairosoft games is games like Grand Prix Story, where you’re focused primarily on building up the stats of your stable of competitors, in this case tennis pros.

This mostly comes in the form of alternating between building up your facilities to make money as a trainer, and then using what you’ve earned to train up your staff to compete in tournaments. Of course, this game doesn’t let players actually control players during these tournaments, which makes it frustrating. This mirrors the experience in Grand Prix Story, where the game forces you to watch the races without giving you any control over their outcome. It naturally follows that this game has many of Kairosoft’s other frequent issues, such as the lack of proper explanations how to do important things like making money. It’s honestly pretty frustrating that even when copying the basic gameplay of a game that came out five years before, Kairosoft can’t seem to fix any of the issues that were present in that game.

As I mentioned above, this game makes use of Kairosoft’s signature presentation style using simple retro-styled pixel art visuals, paired with repetitive chiptune music and sound effects. Apart from the forgettable, annoying synthesized music, everything about this presentation is really endearing, though by this point we’ve seen more or less the same thing in numerous other Kairosoft games.

Overall, Tennis Club Story feels like Kairosoft at their laziest, not only copying their previous work and just slotting in a new theme, but failing to address any of the issues present in that previous work. I suppose there may be some players out there who fantasize about managing a group of tennis professionals who might find this game amusing, but mostly I think they’ll just be disappointed.

tl;dr – Tennis Club Story is a Management Simulation where players train up their staff of tennis pros while also attracting guests to pay for lessons. This game reuses the same basic formula of some games Kairosoft has been releasing since 2011, yet fixes none of the problems that formula has. I don’t recommend it.

Grade: C

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

^{This month’s sponsors are Jamie and His Cats, Ben, Ilya Zverev, Andy Miller, Homer Simpin, Johannes, Francis Obst, Gabriel Coronado-Medina, Jared Wark, Kristoffer Wulff, and Seth Christenfeld. Thank you for helping to keep the reviews coming!}