Top Spin 3 Review

BY Nicholas Rego | POSTED: 23 July 2008

Serving up a complete ace.



With temperatures soaring steadily in Dubai, most of us are fleeing the great outdoors and are either holidaying elsewhere for the summer or hibernating in the air-conditioned shopping malls. But for those of us who have no intention of leaving the house, summer means DVD movie marathons and gaming nights. But for anyone who still craves for a bit of outdoors but without the heat wave, 2K games have come out with Top Spin 3 for the Playstation 3 which is possibly one of the best tennis games out at the moment, despite a few snags.

Anyone who’s played tennis in real life will appreciate the amount of detail that has gone into making this game look and feel as authentic as possible. And just to make things clear, real life tennis invoices actually playing on the courts with a tennis ball and racket, and not swishing around a Nunchuck in Wii Sports. Top Spin 3 brings all the famous names in tennis right to your living room, along with a host of features and playable venues.

Starting off, the game allows you to enter a fairly straightforward career mode, where you start off as a rookie player, and work your way up the ranks, winning matches and tournaments in order to play against the famous names in the sport. The game offers an incredibly detailed player creator, which allows you to change every aspect of your player, such as eye, hair, clothing, and even slapping on some tattoos. You can later pop into a store to buy different outfits for your player, all of them of course branded with the big names in sportswear. After you’ve perfected your player’s looks, you can start playing matches against other rookie players, until you’re right up there with the big boys (and girls). The matches are executed beautifully, with plenty of atmosphere, and narrow scrapes as you charge around for the ball. Apart from, your standard career mode, the game also offers Exhibition mode, which will let you quickly select a player and play against an AI opponent or a second player, or play a doubles match. Either way, the gameplay is fluid and a lot of fun.

Where the game does exceptionally well is in the presentation – all the players look just like their real life counterparts, and even a classic player like Monica Seles comes complete with her signature on-court yelps as she serves. What’s even better is that player grow tired the more they run around the court, and the more worn out your computer opponent becomes, the more likely they are to serve up a fault instead of an ace. You can even see sweat build up on players as the game progresses, while the camera pans around the court after a shot to zoom in on player reactions – though the camera showed plenty of stuttering while panning over the court just before the match began. The players move fluidly and gracefully, proving that plenty of motion-capture has gone into this game - garments flap in the wind, crowds cheer and then fall silent, and sunlight fades in and out and clouds pass by overhead. It’s all executed beautifully and in stunning detail, making each game look and feel as if you’re watching a real live tennis match.

If you tire of the Exhibition and career modes, you can hop online to pit your skills against other players. The online play of the game is a bit of a mixed bag. On one hand you can compete against any player in a singles tournament, but if you want to play a doubles match, your partner has to be a local player on the same console as you – a rather bizarre notion which really confuses the multiplayer aspect of the game. it would have been nice to team up with a complete stranger and go head to head against another pair. Although even in a singles match online, the game doesn’t do too well – games often lag behind terribly, so you’re quite likely to miss that crucial return shot or volley. Even when playing against someone in my own city, the game didn’t handle too well, and numerous times I lost a match because the game wasn’t able to sync my player in time to return a shot. This turns out to be quite a nuisance, and the multiplayer mode clearly has a lot of scope, but the interruptions in play are its downfall.  Another truly frustrating point of this game is the amount of time it’s going to take you to learn the controls. The game features a sort of training school where you’re introduced to the various concepts of the game, such as moving your player, returning shots, and special returns – all with the help of a ball-sputtering robot.

But with over 20 different lessons to go through, this is not a game you can simply pick up and play. For example, the face buttons control what type of return your player executes, and by holding down a button, you can control the force of your return. Too much force and the ball will so sailing out of the court – too little force and you end up hitting the net. You can also perform ‘risk returns’ which can hurl the ball past your opponent, but again these often end up outside the court, so it’s worth skipping them.

Top Spin 3 definitely gets my vote as the best tennis game out there at the moment. Its fluid graphics, scores of players, variety of courts (minus Wimbledon) and excellent presentation make this a must-have for any tennis fan. Even with the steep learning curve, this is one game that truly looks and feels like the real game.