With the release of 2003’s Top Spin, developers Power and Magic put up the first real challenge to Sega’s all-conquering Virtua Tennis series. Many a title has come and gone since, but nothing has ever come as close to claiming the title in the Tennis genre as the Xbox original did. With Top Spin 2, the team are ramping things up for the Xbox 360, and are looking to lay waste to the claims that the game is just a graphical update.
From the outset, Top Spin 2 oozes class. The player creation options when heading into a new career mode game are incredibly powerful and easy to use, and you’ll have a character that looks just like you (or whoever you modelled them on) running about on the court within minutes. Clothes, haircuts, face shapes, beards and all the usual suspects are available to play with, although quite why you can’t have a traditional moustache and goatee-style beard, but can have a beard with stripes running through it is a bit of a puzzler ‘ still, hardly a game-breaking problem. When you do get into career mode proper, there is an absolute stack of things to do. Virtua Tennis-alike mini-games help to ‘train’ your player and improve your character’s abilities, whilst various coaches are on offer to give advice and let you know where you’re going wrong. This works very well, and offers more than a diversion from straight up tournament or online play, as I’ll mention later. The mini-games aren’t as addictive as the ones found in VT, for sure, but tasks such as breaking down a loosely stacked wall, or hammering down stacks of Mah-jongg tiles (not dominoes, as the game describes them) are fun and challenging for the larger part, even if a few are pretty much no-brainers.
On the court, not much has changed from the first edition. Four different types of shot are available to you ‘ controlled with the four face buttons ‘ and you’ll find that these are more than enough to get the job done. Against tougher opponents, the ‘risk’ shot option from the original Top Spin can be used, simply by holding down the right trigger. If you hold it down too long, for not long enough or try to play a risk return when you haven’t got any momentum, you’ll end up fluffing the shot. This happens nine times out of ten, unfortunately, and there doesn’t seem to be any real rhyme or reason for it. This is easily proved in the career mode, when your character is given the option of ‘learning’ these shots. You head to the gym with your task being to pull off three risk shots against your coach, and I’m not ashamed to say that I pretty much gave up on trying to master two of them. The system is far too finicky to be of any real use in a match. Why would you play a shot if it was all but guaranteed to hit the net or fly out of bounds’ If and when you do manage to hit the shot in a match, it feels superb and will generally out-fox your opponent. This risk system would be a nice addition to the game, but given the amount of times you’ll be punished for trying the move, you’ll end up using it rarely. Also making a return is the ‘attitude’ option. After a point, press your right or left shoulder button to start off an animation which shows how angry your player is, or how great they are. As in the first game, this is utterly pointless and just serves (sorry) to slow things down needlessly.
One other problem rears its head at the most unfortunate of times, and that is a bad case of over-animation. Your player never feels like they’re in contact with the court surface at the best of times, but on some occasions they’ll float like a butterfly across the court to reach a long ball, and suddenly begin to stumble towards it, flapping aimlessly at a return and managing losing the point. If there was no stumble (which was caused by nothing, given that the ball was within a playable distance) ‘ you’d have returned the shot. When this happens at break point or ‘ even worse ‘ set point, you’ll be tearing your hair out. It doesn’t happen that often, but often enough to be noticeable.
With those niggles aside, we can get on with enjoying the grand slam action. When playing against a CPU opponent early in career mode, a stiff challenge can be found. In fact, if you win one of your first five matches, you’re doing better than me. Long, long rallies are the order of the day generally, and getting the upper hand on your opponent is not as easy as you’d think. That training that I mentioned is what’s required, since that improves your abilities, which in turn gives you a greater chance of owning the court. Training costs money, so this is where the regional tournaments and real-world sponsorship deals come into play. You don’t start out on the Centre Court at Wimbledon; you have to work your way there.
Online, there is fun to be had. As in the first edition, Top Spin 2 is a very solid multiplayer game. Doubles matches can be played, and these can be incredibly fun at times. Given the speed of the sport, lag was always going to come into it somewhere or other, and although it is noticeable, you’ll only ever realistically be able to blame one or two dropped shots on connection issues. It doesn’t cause a massive problem, and I’ve experienced matches without any lag whatsoever during my playing time. You can only use your single player character online for ranked matches however, and whilst this gives you the incentive to really get down and dirty with the offline mode to improve your character’s skills, it feels a little unfair when the game contains real life players such as Maria Sharapova and Andy Roddick. You could say that this presents a real hybrid offline/online challenge, but when you’ve just bought the game and fancy a quick match, you’ll have to be very lucky to meet someone who is also using a default character ‘ and if you don’t, you’ll be hammered. You can use the real pros in an unranked online match, but what’s the point in that’ In other words, play the offline career mode for at least a couple of hours before you even dream of tearing up the ranks online.
Aesthetically, Top Spin 2 doesn’t really take advantage of the 360 hardware as it could. I feel that a lot of work has gone into the backgrounds, arenas and sound effects, but the players could easily have been ripped out of a late-generation Xbox title. That isn’t to say that it doesn’t look great, because it does ‘ just that more polish could have been applied to the character’s movement and general shot animations. Sonically, my preference was to turn off the music that runs softly in the background of the matches ‘ but that’s simply a matter of choice. Everything else sounds great, and although there are some seemingly overly long loading sections at times (particularly when you’re heading into and out of training games), the front-end is easy to navigate and does its job well.
What surprises me about Top Spin 2 is exactly how accurately it resembles a real game of tennis. Players with poor stamina start to play badly towards the end of a long, long match. Players who can’t get any momentum going start to make mistakes as they see the points begin to rack up against them, and the whole result of a match can rest upon the outcome of one point. However great Virtua Tennis was, each player would always start each point with their full range of mental and physical abilities intact ‘ and that just isn’t tennis. Play in a real match and see if ‘ after you’re two sets down and facing match point ‘ you can keep your composure to play that delicate little dropped shot over the net to save the point. You’ll either be too tired or too stressed to do it ‘ and Top Spin 2 reflects this incredibly well.
