Top Spin 3

July 11,2008 - When it comes to tennis games these days, it seems like most of them opt to stick with arcadey gameplay instead of going for the realistic feel that mimics the sport many people see on TV. The Top Spin series appeared back on the original Xbox in order to try to buck the trend with a more realistic approach to the game. Unfortunately, the first two iterations stuck with the Virtua Tennis-style control scheme and the gameplay was mainly a more realistic version of that gameplay style. With Top Spin 3, 2K Sports has managed to finally push its gameplay and controls fully into the realistic realm for a tennis game that’s truly been made for those who follow the sport on TV. The big question is has Top Spin 3 managed to stay fun through this process?

The biggest change to Top Spin 3 over its last next-gen iteration is easily the controls. While it still has shot types mapped to the face buttons, you’re now able to determine the power of the shot by holding down the button for a certain amount of time before the ball reaches you to pre-load the power into the shot. While that may sound confusing, it’s not much different than before, but it may take you a few matches to get used to it. The other new addition is the new analog stick controls that let you replace your normal button-pushing with stick-flicking, but serving’s really the only part of that addition that works well enough to replace what you were doing before. Luckily, the game has a very good Tennis School tutorial mode that can give you a good rundown of everything the game offers control-wise, mainly because it can be hard to get a grasp of everything with a quick glimpse of the manual.

As for how the game itself feels when you’re on the court, it’s easy to say that Top Spin 3 is certainly the slowest and most methodical game in the series so far. Unless your player is superior to the other, many of your matches can feature long rallies and result more in your opponent or yourself messing up to score points rather than seeing the ball whizzing past either one of you. It’s nice to see some trick shots in the game, such as between the legs shots or behind the back shots, which spices things up a bit and gives these players some personality.

The coolest part of the game comes with something that you may not expect to be more than just a graphical effect, which is how the exhaustion and sweating ties into the game. With stamina being one of the main skills you’ll power up in the career mode, you’ll notice the heart rate monitor that appears above both players before the serve and that both players will sweat as their stamina goes down. As the match goes on, you’ll notice sweaty armpits, faces, hair, and eventually the sweat goes down their neck and soaks the shirt as the match goes on, which is when you’ll notice the player’s shots getting sloppier and their animations showing their lack of energy, which affects gameplay and is a really nice graphical touch. Top Spin 3 is certainly the ultimate next-gen sweat sports game.

The career mode in Top Spin 3 has changed a bit over previous iterations, as it’s less in-depth than the career modes before it. Initially, you’ll notice that you have to create your character before being able to start a career mode and exit career mode to buy new clothes and rackets with your earnings, which is strange when the first two games offered both of these options in the mode itself. Once you do manage to get into the mode with a new character, it’ll ask you to essentially prove yourself before you can get on the tour, which generally offers two tournaments a month, one hard and one easy tournament, and work your way up the ranks through success. As you win matches, you’ll earn experience points to better your skills and unlock points for new clothing, but the main issue is the initial skill difference between you and your opponents, so that you’ll be facing mid-50 level opponents while you’re still at the lower 30’s. That makes it overly frustrating, compounded with the initial issues with grasping the control scheme, to have a small margin for error for anyone that’s not a tennis game master right out of the box. Luckily the game does offer the ability to lower or increase the difficulty at any point so you can get a grasp of the game and increase your skills to be a much better competitor on the normal or harder difficulty modes. If you can get over that initial hurdle, there’s a lot of fun to be had because the developers managed to streamline this mode a bit more and let you just focus on winning matches and improving yourself.

Outside of the career mode, you can check out the exhibition and tournament modes for your single-player and local multiplayer fix with the numerous top professionals in the Tennis world. You can find 19 pros in both versions, with the PS3 version oddly getting Rafael Nadal exclusively to make it 20 pros for that version, featuring ten men, six women, and three legends (Boris Becker, Bjorn Borg, and Monica Seles) that you can use both offline and in online matches, as well. The online mode is split up between simple online matches, both singles and doubles, and a more in-depth World Tour mode that somewhat takes the career mode framework and applies it to online play for a more organized set-up.

While Top Spin 2 felt more like a higher-res version of the first Top Spin, Top Spin 3 definitely feels like it was made for the next generation consoles, with the aforementioned sweating/exhaustion mechanic and an overall attention to detail that results in players that look nicely-detailed and are animated really well. Even just looking at the shots, where anything that’s not a perfect shot looks awkward and off-balanced, which is the way it would be for players that aren’t experts. Free-flowing hair looks unsightly and it’s a shame that the crew surrounding the court don’t react to the ball hurtling towards them. The courts and arenas are well-designed and unique enough so that none of them feel similar enough to make it repetitive to keep playing through tournaments in the career mode.

Audio’s done nicely in Top Spin 3, though you wouldn’t expect much out of a sport that’s full of grunting and clapping. The player creation tool offers up a good amount of options for tailoring your player’s grunting options to get your preferred results. As unique as the arenas are visually, the same can be said for their audio, mostly in that the size of the crowds produce an expected amount of clapping. The soundtrack’s full of your typical pop rock and some hip hop, which are fairly average for sports games, so if you’re more into your own music, you have your custom soundtrack option for the 360 version and other means for the PS3 version.

When all’s said and done, Top Spin 3 is very much the best simulation tennis game out there, though it’s not like there’s much competition in that corner of the tennis market. If you’re interested at all, check out the demos on Xbox Live and PlayStation Network or rent the game first, because that initial learning curve can be what ruins the game for you, but those that can brave the storm will find a nice, sunny experience ahead. If you care more about ease in controls and getting to the fun part of the game, then there are better options out there.

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