Top Spin for PlayStation 2 Reviews by Gamers

Nearly two years ago, Microsoft released the critically acclaimed Top Spin as part of its XSN online sports lineup. The tennis title was often compared to Sega's Virtua Tennis for multiple reasons, one of them being its tight, responsive, easy to learn, and most importantly, fun gameplay. While the Dreamcast's Virtua Tennis still retains the title of Best Tennis Game Ever around the IGN offices, it's no doubt that Top Spin is still the best tennis game the Xbox has seen thus far.

And two years later, after Microsoft sold off all of its sports franchises, 2K Sports is bringing Top Spin to the PlayStation 2. Was the title's transition over to PlayStation 2 dead-on, or did it get a few bad calls by the line judge? Does the title stand up to other competition on the court these days, including its own sequel coming to Xbox 360?

The answer is sort of. While Top Spin is wholly the same as it was on Xbox when it was released a couple years back, that's essentially all it is. Not that that's a bad thing as Top Spin is still a great game, but its presence on PlayStation 2 is marred a bit by the PS2's lesser hardware and a lack of additional "oomph" that could, and should, have been added.

Eye on the Ball

Top Spin's control and on-court gameplay were its best aspects on Xbox and luckily these elements have transitioned quite nicely for the most part. The game's control scheme remains wholly intact, with a different shot type assigned to each of the face buttons and risk moves assigned to R1 and L1. Pressing either shoulder button brings up a meter with a quick-moving needle, and a timed release when the needle is in the center of the meter will result in a deadly-quick shot. It's quite easy to miss this though, resulting in a poorly placed and likely out-of-bounds shot, making for a nice risk-reward system.

Like the Xbox version of the game, it isn't perfect however. Nailing a risk shot will result in a really powerful blast, but not enough more so than nailing a standard shot, which means that the risk-reward element is a fair bit heavier on the side of risk than the reward. If you're able to dial in risk shots time after time you'll very likely be completely dominant as there is a definite benefit to doing so, but if you're only 50-50 then you're probably going to lose your ass on the court. Your opponent can defend and return a nailed risk shot, but you're totally screwed if you miss your timing. This setup would likely have worked better if these shots were tweaked to be simultaneously harder to do and more powerful, making them essentially kill shots that were really difficult (and hence rare) to pull off.

Aside from that slight complaint about the game's general design, Top Spin does play very well. Controls are dead-on and responsive, players generally react like you'd expect them to and the AI can get tough later on in the game. You need to mix up your shots a fair bit once you get to the higher rankings, though you can get through a fair bit of the game with the standard X-button power stroke and well-placed shots.

Top Spin's on-court play, like many other tennis games before it, is heavily based on position, timing and shot selection. The game is more about out-thinking your opponent, planning a shot or two ahead and generally making sure you're always in great position for key shots. The controls are forgiving enough that it leaves the emphasis on the head-game aspects of tennis, and combined with its simplistic control setup, makes for an easy to pickup title that also has a great bit of depth, allowing for great long-term multiplayer rivalries.

All told play-wise, while Top Spin could have certainly used some slight improvements to its risk shot system, the game still plays very well, even if it's not the freshest fish at the market.

Going Pro

As mentioned, the PlayStation 2 port of Top Spin is for the most part a straight port of the two year-old Xbox original. The character creator is just as good as ever, offering you the ability to tweak your pro's head and body like a lump of clay. There are very few games that offer this level of player customization these days, and only a select few (like Fight Night and Tiger Woods) are actually better and more robust than Top Spin.

Its career mode is also pretty fun to start, though quickly evolves into simply playing tournament after tournament once your player is maxed out with stats -- which again, happens rather quickly. Not that this is an entirely bad thing, but the start of your career is much more varied with multiple training sessions to partake in, a handful of sponsors to woo and so forth. It would be nice if these elements could have had staying power over the course of your career, but as it is the main singleplayer mode works pretty well. If nothing else, striving to reach the top of the ranks is a decent enough incentive to play match after match.

Where's the Beef?

As we mentioned at the start of the review, there are a certain number of disappointments, or even pitfalls if you're looking at them harshly enough, that make Top Spin out to seem sort of like a bare-bones port. Well, maybe bare-bones isn't the right descriptor as the entire game is indeed intact, but there are a few things that could have been added to round the game out a little better, or improved to make it a little closer to the original version.

For starters, the game is pretty damn ugly, at least when compared with the Xbox version, which looked simply fantastic. Player detail is OK, but they look rather flat when compared to the athletes in other titles featuring many times the amount of on-screen players as Top Spin. Every once in a while you will run into a downright ugly looking opponent, though we'll chalk that one up to his or her mother's digital DNA rather than the visual horsepower.

Shadows are a little on the basic side, with only a fairly minimal amount of polygons making them up. The courts feature pretty nice net physics, but they don't quite "pop" like those on the Xbox version. Of course, most games look better on the Xbox than they do on the PlayStation 2, but even considering that, Top Spin's visuals are pretty lackluster.

The animations are as good as ever on the court, offering up a very high number of variations in shot types and so forth. Unfortunately though, there are a very limited number of animations assigned to after-point taunts and the like. We've seen our player wave his hand and racket together in a "You never had a chance" manner or pump his fist for a more subtle celebration so many times that we've basically given up on using the reaction options altogether. Really, it doesn't seem like a lot to ask for half-a-dozen reactions for players to keep things mixed up a bit. As it is, you'll find your on-screen persona reacting exactly the same way time after time.

While the game's presentation with regards to its singleplayer map navigation, player customization aspects and so forth are all great, it suffers miserably with its load times. The Xbox version wasn't much better, but it gets to become frustrating waiting for literally a minute or so for the game to save and then load the next match, or even simply the map screen. If you're playing a tournament with quick individual matches, you'll be waiting for the game to load a reasonably large percentage of your total time in the tournament.

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