Grand Slam Tennis 2 Review
Last year was a huge year for tennis. Federer was knocked off his perch and Novak Djokovic started to show why he was the real deal. It promoted a lot of extra interest in the sport and the arrival of EA Sports' Grand Slam Tennis franchise in 2009 couldn't have been more perfect. But unlike the first iteration, this time around they've moved away from the cartoony graphics and gone for the hardcore simulation crowd – something which may have been a bad move. Nice licences are great, but they mean little if the essence of the sport isn't captured and that's what's happened here.
The core of the Grand Slam Tennis 2 experience is the career mode. Here, you create your own tennis player, kit them up with merchandise and try to take on the tennis world by storm.
It never really kicks off though. You're able to play in the main tournaments, but the career mode will never grip you, mainly because it doesn't simulate a proper career. Instead, everything is built around the different grand slams. Before each slam, you can take part in a smaller tournament, do some rather easy/pointless training or take part in an exhibition match. After that, you're straight into the slam.
The slam itself is also rather lifeless. You see the draw, which is made up of a combination of real and fake players and then you're straight into the matches. Rinse and repeat until the tournament is over, then you just move onto the next one. You do get a little summary after each match, where your rank improves (which doesn't make much sense), but this part of the game feels a little limp on the whole.
The gameplay doesn't offer much of an improvement either, which there being very little emphasis on realism. EA Sports are always trying to push the use of analog sticks these days and in Grand Slam Tennis 2, this is no different. It sees the arrival of Total Racket Control, a system where you can pretty much control your entire shot repertoire using the right analog stick. The premise here, is that by using different motions, you can choose different shots. For example, if you pull the stick down and release, this will be a slice – push down and then push up and you'll perform a top spin shot.
You can see why they've done this, but the problem comes with its implementation – it just doesn't work very well. Often, when trying to perform a slice, you'll end up performing another type of shot and this doesn't even take into consideration that when using this control scheme, the aiming of shots is also performed using the right analog stick.
It's a lot easier to just use a traditional control scheme, but even here the button placement is a little weird. Typically, you'd have the three different shot types aligned across the bottom three buttons, but EA has chosen to assign slice to both Square and Circle, with X being for normal shots and Triangle for top spin. This is a bit of a moot point though, because the different shots all feel rather similar.
