Top Spin 4 Review
Despite their being a plethora of tennis games down the years, many have struggled to really capture the dynamic nature of the sport. On the surface, it might seem like a very repetitive endeavour, but underneath, you'll realise that every single point creates its own independent battle. And this is what many games in the past have failed to replicate as more often than not, players are forced to use the same plays time and time again in order to win. Top Spin 4 looks to alter that though, offering options to keep the action much more dynamic, and it really pays off.
Before you get sucked into the action, the Top Spin Academy should be your first port of call. The development team over at 2K Czech decided that not only would they help you to understand the game's different mechanics, but at the same time, they would instil a bit of tennis knowledge into you too. Here, you'll be able to tackle the various shot types and also learn when to use them.
After going through all of that, you'll be greeted with a few standard offline modes. You have Exhibition, Career and King of the Court. Exhibition is fairly self-explanatory and King of the Court is a fun variant whereby the winner stays on, until they've won a certain amount of matches. They're quite fun to play if you have some friends over, but the bulk of the experience will take place in the game's Career mode.
After creating your future tennis star, you'll have to work your way up the ranks by winning the various tournaments that are thrown your way. These start off in minor venues, but the game essentially replicates your arrival on the ATP Tour, not what comes before that. In other words, it doesn't delve into the realms of Futures or Challengers, and goes straight for smaller ATP tournaments like Estoril.
To simplify things further, the season is split up into months. This means you can only take part in one tournament per month, but you can also do some preparation for the tournament. This might be in the form of a sparring session, which you'll likely do at the start of your career, but this will quickly move towards taking part in special events. Special events can range from, attending an interview session or taking part in charity matches, but they will always give you something back in the form of either experience points or an increase in popularity. It's nice that the developers actually paid attention to this side of the game too; professionals don't spend all of their time training.
As you progress through your career, the game will give you objectives to meet. In an interesting choice, you'll have to fulfil these objectives to be able to enter harder tournaments, not by rising in the rankings. Sure, these will go hand-in-hand if you keep winning events, but in the real world of tennis, you can get extremely high in the rankings by being consistent - you don't have to win everything. This means that you might be more than eligible to say, enter a Masters event, but since you haven't won enough minor tournaments, the game won't let you. It's not a massive hindrance, but it would have been nicer if tournament entry was based purely on rankings, and your "status" affected something else instead.