Hot Shots Tennis

August 16,2007 - With the Hot Shots Golf series reaching its sixth iteration, it’s a good time for Clap Hanz to branch out and try another sport. If the title of the game wasn’t enough of a hint, tennis is the latest sport that is finally getting a Hot Shots makeover. Bringing the anime-style looks and simple, yet deep gameplay to the realm of tennis certainly looks like a match made in heaven, but does Hot Shots Tennis prove that it’s a worthy game of tennis?

From the start, it’s easy to see that Hot Shots Tennis aims to be a game that allows those who are new to the game of tennis to hop right in and learn the basics. Not only do the loading screens offer tips to help you learn the game, the training mode offers a crash course in service play, volleying, smashes, and general tennis practice along with the main gameplay giving the player a lot of feedback to help them improve their timing. All of the training games are based on aiming your shots at the colored section of the court, which brings the intuitive way to aim your shots into play. The gist of aiming is that the neutral position of the left analog stick will hit the ball right at the center of your opponents’ court, so pushing the analog stick downwards hits the ball just over the net while pushing it upwards aims towards the baseline. This allows for the most precise aiming of any tennis game out there. It’s unfortunate that if the ball hits the net, it’s a dead ball, meaning even if it goes over, your opponent is doomed to lose the point even if they’re at the net. Of course, this all turns around if the camera’s not at your back, but time your shots well and you’ll have no trouble.

Once you get into an actual match, you’ll see that Hot Shots Tennis is all about timing. There are no meters here, just a focus on timing with some key feedback on how well you’re doing. For every swing you make, you’ll get both an audio and visual cue that tells you if you swung too early, too late, or with perfect timing. With early and late shots, you’ll see a rabbit and turtle above your head, respectively, and notes above your head when you make a great swing. If you swing early or late, you’ll also hear an unpleasant thud, while great shots sound more like what you’d expect them to sound like. Along with that, you can also see a large X, triangle, or circle surrounding the ball to indicate the type of shot it is. Throw in the stats screen that you see after each match, which grades you out of 100 points on how well you performed, and there should be no problem with improving your game as you progress up the ranks.

As for the features that the game offers, it’s rather basic and shallow compared to what the Virtua Tennis and Top Spin games offer since there are only multiplayer, single-player, and training modes. That’s it. Luckily, the singe-player mode, called Hot Shots Challenge mode, takes after the PSP Hot Shots Golf, offering tiers of matches that allow you to win new characters, courts, umpires, and outfits. Unfortunately, skilled players can make it through to the top of this mode without a scratch in a short amount of time, so it really seems like you’re encouraged to play with the multiplayer mode, called Fun Time Tennis, to get the most out of your money’s worth here. There aren’t very many things to unlock, so with the typical short length of these matches and the handful or so matches per tier, don’t expect much more than maybe six to eight hours out of that mode. Until you start reaching the upper tiers, it’s easy enough to use the same tactics to defeat every opponent at first, but once you get through a few tiers, things get tougher. That forces you to pick the characters you’re good with, as upper tier players require that you’re good enough to handle their precise requirements, which is a nice reward for actually getting better at the game that most tennis games lack these days.

Graphically, Hot Shots Tennis is definitely the best looking Hot Shots game on the PS2, which is to be expected with the last Hot Shots Golf game appearing nearly three years ago. The lack of a huge hole to display allows for a lot of detail to be added to each court with brings them to life, such as gophers popping out of the ground on one of the dirt courts to errant soccer balls bouncing across the tennis court in the park. The players themselves have nice animations and the cutscenes show the facial animations quite nicely. It’s also nice to see that when you miss a shot, your player falls on their butt in a humorous manner. If you happen to miss seeing all of the players from the Hot Shots Golf series, you’ll be happy to see that they do attend matches (you may also see one appear as an unlockable umpire).

The audio portion of Hot Shots Tennis is pretty much on par with the Hot Shots Golf games. It’s nice to see the audio cues that help you tell good shots from bad shots, but the menu music is still that techno music that can drive you nuts when hearing it for long stretches at a time. The players have decent voices that certainly fit their characters, but you hardly hear them talk outside of just cutscenes between games and after the matches.

Overall, Hot Shots Tennis is definitely a nice start to a new branch of the Hot Shots franchise. It’s not going to blow anyone away with the features, but Hot Shots fans should definitely check it out along with fans of tennis games in general. Your $30 isn’t going to get you a lot of single-player content like you’d expect from the Hot Shots Golf games, but it’s nice to see budget prices for these kinds of games, as it would definitely be a rip-off at full price.

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