Review: Top Spin 4

As an avid tennis player and fan, I hold my breath each and every year and hope that a tennis game will be developed that is actually enjoyable. There have been some in the past that have been close, but not since Mario Tennis 64 have I enjoyed playing a tennis game as much as I enjoyed playing Top Spin 4. The Top Spin franchise has always run on the same basic style of play, but the few extra subtle details in 2K Sports’ most recent release has pushed it to a new level.

The basic concept is the same as most tennis games: you have your 20 odd professional tennis players that you can play with in various combinations of single- and multi-player. The game opens with a “Federer vs Ball Machine” match to help you get used to hitting the ball because, FINALLY, the actual timing of the ball plays a much more important role in the end result of the shot than in any other tennis game I have played. Hitting the shot “too soon” or “too late” results in shots that are not as efficient, hard, precise and are more likely to result in an unforced error. “Good’”and “Perfect” shots — as their names suggest — result in harder, more precise shots that are more likely to result in winners. You can then continue to develop your skills in the “Top Spin Academy,” which also helps you in understanding how to develop your character into the three main types of tennis play styles later in “Career” mode. Whether you want your player to be astute in serve and volley, baseline defensive or the more popular baseline offense, it is all there to help better understand the different skills involved in each area.

Top Spin 4‘s Career mode is pretty standard to all games, except it doesn’t take as long as others to get up to the top of your career. You start already on the pro-tour — albeit at the bottom — but the fun is in climbing up to the top. You develop your skills via XP earned from games played and practice matches. Along the way you can also select coaches to suit the type of game style you would like to develop and complete their challenges to boost your stats. With five different difficulty settings there is a level that will suit just about anyone.

To get to the top of your career, you not only have to get your ranking up but you need to have the most number of fans; admittedly, this really goes hand in hand.

The thing I liked most about Career mode is the fact that the player creation tools allowed me to finally create players who didn’t look ridiculous. I’d never understood why games didn’t offer more freedom with the creation of players, but finally my thoughts were answered in this game.  Another really good thing about player creation is that if you have already finished a career and boosted your player up to the maximum level of 20 and you decide you’d like to create a new player, you have the option of starting with enough XP to boost your player to level 20 without having to go through the entire exercise all over again.

The feature of this game that keeps me playing is multiplayer over Xbox Live. Instead of simply logging on and playing a pointless singles match against whoever happens to be online at the time, you can compete in the “World Tour” with the player you created in your career. The Tour has different tournaments that you compete in that have the same setup as actual tournaments; if you lose in the first round, you are knocked out and you can’t progress until the start of the next season.  Each season in the Tour lasts a week and then everything resets again so you can start playing in new tournaments. You can also play quick matches that increase your player’s grade if you win.Unfortunately as time goes on, the numbers of online players dwindle, but there are still hundreds of people who are online at any one time.

As with all Xbox Live servers there can be issues with lag, and I swear it always seems that if there is an odd number of players waiting to play in the session I am always the one who doesn’t get paired up…but that might just be me.

Another downside is that the stats seem to give certain players more of an advantage over others. “Stamina” and “speed” are pretty consistent no matter what level you upgrade them to, but “power” seems to be a bit all over the place. In saying that, I did log into the Xbox Live servers today and a message came up acknowledging this fact, claiming that this has been fixed. Allegedly, there are some notable changes being put into place in both the “stamina” and “speed” categories with more importance being placed on the timing of the ball.

What sets this game apart from the countless others is that you can tell the developers have paid a lot of attention to small details in actual tennis gameplay. The actual professional players’ individual strengths and weaknesses, sliding around on the clay and grass courts, and tactics that work best in real life — including the timing of the ball and the consequences of mistiming the ball — all are spot on. The players sweat, not only on their face but on their bodies; sweat patterns begin to appear on clothing after a while. Anyone who actually watches tennis would know is true, and a nice little touch in the game. Players’ outfits even get stained when playing on clay or grass courts; small details like that just add to the game’s realistic appeal.

I am going to make a huge statement here by saying Top Spin 4 is the best tennis game on the market and I highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys a good sports game, especially those who are interested — even the slightest bit — in tennis.