Top Spin 4: Serving up the Real Tennis Experience

2K Czech's Top Spin 4, with its fancy TV-style cut-scenes, accurate play style animation for some of the sport's greatest players and scarily well-captured oohs and aahs from the crowd at matches, takes a different route from most tennis games. While Wii Sports distilled the game down to its basic matter of win or lose and at the other end of the scale Top Spin 3 left players facing an epic learning curve with its intricate control system, Top Spin 4 sets out to tackle that most elusive of tennis's draws: the experience of actually watching and playing it.

And to its enormous credit it comes fairly close to doing just that. After spending a good few hours with Top Spin 4's career mode, what comes across is not the complexity of the control system or the challenge inherent in winning every point, but rather a sense of the real drama of tennis.

It's in the subtlety and nuance of performance and the nail-biting edge-of-seat hairs-breadth point play that makes the real game so fascinating to watch. And as you level your character up through the minors, the majors and the grand slams until you're competing with the world's top-flight players, this drama escalates with every game.

The control system is decidedly more pick-up-and-play this time, though the game certainly emphasises the subtleties of advanced techniques that can be learnt in its Top Spin Academy. In the end it proves much more fun to learn them as you move through career mode, with helpful on-screen pointers during the game and at loading screens, enhancing the complexity of your game just as a real-life coach might.

And, in fact, doing it this way helps you make decisions about the allocation of experience points in key disciplines such as serve & volley and offensive & defensive baseline play. Various in-game coaches provide experience bonuses and certain shots become much easier as you skill-up in related areas.

Perhaps most surprisingly, though, is that the game's control system encourages the same sort of strategy one might use on the actual court. As our player rose through the ranks we started playing more points up at the net, volleying the ball back to an opponent too slow to respond. And considering the character's level of physical fitness is so much greater than our own, it was exciting to find out what it felt like to actually win such an attempt on the court.

Different opponents have different styles of play based on the same skill-sets used to level up, and especially in the majors and slams this ensures that you're always forced to adapt your game to match. The differences between players are a little subtler than they are in real life, but they're enough to throw you off balance if you aren't careful.

Intercutting breaks in play with shots you'd expect from a TV broadcast of the game sells the simple notion of professional play much more convincingly than one might imagine, too. And while the crowd noise does have a habit of pre-empting certain victories, on the whole it proves quite convincing in moments of real drama.


As rallies drag on and become increasingly tense, so the crowd's teases of excitement ramp up until the winner sends them wild. As match point beckons, so the general excitement of the crowd prompts a call for quiet from the umpire, and that on-court atmosphere encourages the heart-pounding sense that victory is just one winner away.

Arguably, these are just added notes of detail to round out the game. But the drama of tennis comes not just from the players but from the environment they're in. That's something Top Spin 4 understands better than any other tennis game to date.

The history of tennis in videogames stretches right back to Pong, and plenty of challengers have attempted the contradictory task of replicating the feeling of the sport from the slouched comfort of a sofa. But while Top Spin 4 will do nothing to whip you into shape - even with its PlayStation Move controls – it at least dares to try and make you feel like a professional tennis player. That's a lofty ambition indeed, but what we saw of the game in our play through suggests they may well have pulled it off.

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