Tennis World Tour was a severe disappointment on all fronts, however it’s sequel has caught the eyes of many due to the new and impressive roster, and a new timing system. But does it do enough? COMING SOON!
The first Tennis World Tour scored a mere 45 on Metacritic, it was not well received by most critics and gamers who were accustomed to the 2k Topspin series or Segas Virtua Tennis. But with a new developer in Big Ant Studios (AO Tennis series developers) it was almost a fresh start for this franchise when announced a few months ago.
The game’s layout seems clean: it is just a basic blue background, with tennis player photos shown in the centre, game modes on the left, and a quick overview of your profile on the right: showing both in game currency and the cards you currently have. It presents a sleek and clean presentation much different to that of the original game. It is worth mentioning the overall experience of the game, UI, soundtrack and loading times are well done, compared to other tennis titles of the past wherein you find yourself waiting eternities loading into a match, TWT2 like its predecessor loads extremely quickly accompanied by the functioning UI which we had no issues with thus far.
GAME MODES:
Exhibition allows matches locally: it features classic P1 vs AI, P1 vs P2 and, in addition, for the first time in this saga, one can also be a spectator of an AI vs AI matchup – There is also the possibility, and also for the first time in the saga, to play doubles exhibition matches, a feature heavily requested and initially promised by the first game devs, that was never delivered upon. This mode allows up to 4 friends to play together locally.
We have also got to say that this feature is still limited, since there is no possibility to have different save files, not allowing the player to leave multiple matches on the run.
Tennis School contains some basic gameplay mechanic lessons, useful when you first open up the game or for newcomers to console tennis games, it is made of three different sections: gameplay, advanced and challenges.
Gameplay teaches you the basic gameplay, advanced gets you some advanced tips and tricks, while challenges presents you different situations in which you will have to beat the game at different skills/game scenarios. Challenges will be unlocked via career mode, whereas you can play basic and advanced tutorials since the beginning. (There is the concrete possibility that you get some sort of achievement when you end up beating all the challenges as in the first game, but we didn’t get there).
Tournament mode allows you to play different kinds of tournaments: for those that will buy the ACE edition – or in alternatively the stadia pack – there is the possibility to play the new Tie Break Tens event, featuring new cutscenes and a very nice visual packet, as well as the Roland Garros tournament, obviously played in the licensed French Open courts.
All the players, regardless of the edition of the game they bought or dlcs, will also be able to create their custom tournaments, allowing them to choose the number of rounds, difficulty, tournament time etc, as well as which stadium to play in all the different rounds of the tournament. Ideally this last option would obviously be used in order to play first rounds in less important courts of a Slam or a tournament in general and to get to play the last rounds in Centre court, but it also opens up the possibility to switch surfaces and in general to have a lot of combinations for a single tournament.
Online mode features quick match, online leagues and custom matches.
We did try out ranked modes, but we don’t know how the matchmaking works with quick match – it will probably be something that looks for the nearest, then a little further and so on – we played mainly custom matches. This mode lets you create a lobby with the rules you want, and it is something that wasn’t there with Tennis World Tour 1. The gameplay online feels a little bit slower and clunkier, probably because of some lag containing system, that lets the ball move slower, granting smoothness to the game overall, this could have an impact for those who haven’t got a solid grip on timing, and changes the gameplay in general.
Career mode is very similar to the first game, it would have been nice to get the addition that were brought by Big Ant in their AO Tennis 2 game, making career mode more immersive and story driven, but at the end of the day we just get a basic career mode with a series of different activities to choose between and tournaments to play over the weeks in order to manage your ranking, and a very basic player growth mechanism, with ability points to spend between different macro categories, each influencing different characteristics of the player.
ROSTER AND LICENSING:
To be a great AA/AAA sports game in general, you can’t rely only on gameplay, a big part of sales are the sports fanbase, people that might not be interested in hardcore gameplay, but are surely interested in a game in which they can play as their favourite player or team. Tennis is no different, and in order to increase the sales potential Nacon decided to probably put the most money any publisher has ever put on the table, securing 38 tennis players overall. The game presents the same problem its predecessor had: of all the players included in the game only 11 are part of the WTA roster, a ⅓ ratio that will leave a lot of tennis fans disappointed.
Licensing also stretches to Official Courts and Tournaments as well as branding (which was noticeably absent from our review version). Of the former, the game disappoints in this regard. While it’s great to see the Roland Garros venue and the Masters 1000 Madrid event both returning from the predecessor, only 1 new venue was added for the game- Halle, the home of the pre Wimbledon, grass court 500 series event on the ATP tour. The Tie Break Tens stadium ( in Melbourne) is also new, but that arena is restricted to use in the tournament mode.
GRAPHICS:
At first look, this game is attractive. Clean menu screens, mostly accurate player models and crisp looking stadiums. But as the game settles in, you begin to notice little things- the player outfits, while very exceptional, are also quite unfinished. Shirts and skirts have a strange movement to them, undergarments seem to be tattooed onto the players , facial expressions are quite freakish and the player models themselves look almost as if they are made out of clay.
GAMEPLAY:
Gameplay is the main point of this review, as TWT1 was really a disaster on this topic.
TWT2 is presented as a Tennis simulation, and more specifically its goal is to be the “best simulation Tennis title on consoles”. It shouldn’t be hard to become the most simulative title on console, given the fact that the current gen console market is lacking tennis video games, in particular the only tennis games we have gotten are TWT1 and the AO tennis franchise.
So probably they achieved what they wanted, the game can be considered the best tennis simulation in the current gen console market, but easily not the best simulation overall.
In fact on the one hand, looking at the PC market, we see the likes of Tennis Elbow and Full Ace Tennis, two indie tennis games, achieving much better results in terms of simulation with little means their developers have.
Synthetically, Tennis World Tour 2 proposes a new kind of gameplay, still animation driven, but Big Ant has rebuilt the game dynamics from scratch, making “timing” as a fundamental element and bringing better physics to the ball. While the overall shot making mechanics are really convincing, with the timing working perfectly, and bringing net game to a skill based level, there is big room for improvement under certain aspects. The animation system isn’t fully convincing, while the animations themselves are qualitatively good, the system feels unpolished, presenting really few signature animations and the constant necessity to limit the player on his movement in order to get the feeling of a game running smoothly.
This results in the feeling of our character moving automatically with heavy assistance from the engine. Consequently, we lose some of the feeling of needing to move our character and be “in the right place at the right time”, oftentimes making running feel useless. For us, we feel as if the running is quite underpowered, there are many situations where our player is very much capable of reaching a ball, but no animation is triggered, so our player just runs off the court when the rally should continue.
This limitation ultimately consists in the player losing the possibility to arrive on the ball as he wants to, we feel like this game shouldn’t really referred to as a pure simulation, but more like a simcade tennis game.
Other than this, movement is really limited, with running resulting in being way too useless at times, not giving the player the possibility to take some balls that could be easily reached.
Another problem is presented with drop shots, way too effective, and in general it is unclear how different timings really impact on the game.
Across our team, we all had varying different outlooks on the AI, wherein some found it challenging and some found it very easy to reach the highest level, we believe this to be a good middle ground, and for casual gamers the game seems to be more challenging than its predecessor, due to the unforgiving timing system, which is a real positive.
At times with Tennis World Tour 2, you feel indeed as if you are playing real tennis, however, this feeling is very inconsistent, with there still being almost game breaking deficiencies, one being the groundstroke animation slices, and some animations that ruin the flow of the game, by moving your position too much, giving a very assisted feeling. Another plus however is most of the time the ball is making a solid contact with the racket, which although may seem essential, Tennis World Tour 1 was catastrophic in this case.
FINAL WORD
The overall feeling and sensation of Tennis World 2 is very welcomed. There is a sense of building a point, moving the ball and waiting for an opening- and when the gameplays plays it’s best, this can feel not only satisfying but very realistic to Tennis. The lack of consistency in this feeling brings it down, but the Big Ant team has promised a rather large Day 1 patch that will iron out some of those issues. The common experience in our playthroughs is that this game is the first real step towards Tennis video game glory. Smooth presentation, promising gameplay, deep licensing, a multitude of game options as well as a possible major possibilities for a deep Online tour/event system. The career mode needs work, some animations leave a lot to be desired and the gameplay is not quite consistent yet, but things are definitely looking well for this series.
Screens:
Would you say that this is the best tennis game out there on the console? The last tennis game I played was Top spin 4 on PC, I know this isn’t as good as that, but I want to buy a good tennis game for my Xbox. So should I buy this or should I buy AO tennis 2 given that its half-priced then this one? I am looking for good solid gameplay, player animations, custom player stances, shots matter but the main thing is the gameplay for me. Is this worth it?
Hey! We would probably say yes it is, maybe you would like to wait a bit before buying TWT2, but for us its the most realistic game compared to TS4 and 3, AO tennis 2 is not amazing, if you have a good grasp of tennis and games in general then TWT2 is for you, if you like customization then you can pick AO2.
Thank you for your reply. I’ve read some mixed reviews about this one from other sources but I like your review the best and also I care less about graphics and animations, I want good solid gameplay (partly realistic), which this one promises. I’ve read at a few places that the backhand slices are terrible, is that true? I’m itching to buy this, but I’ll wait for a bit as you said. Also did the game come with the patch update as they promised , or is not out yet? Thanks again!
Hi! The backhand slices indeed do need some work, mainly as they trigger GROUNDSTROKE animations rather than slices 8/10 of the time. However in contact with developers the next patch will fix this (mostly), the first patch will come out tomorrow we guess, so we would still recommend perhaps waiting if you are really conflicted about buying it for now, but still the gameplay is very promising, it is your call! :p We will post some more gameplay of the update on our channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3DHXysO5xOpnNsJ9Sbx1Ew/videos
when it comes out and when further patches come out also! Let us know if you have any more questions.