Matchpoint - Tennis Championships: The First Preview

ign.com:

How long has it been since the release of the last truly great tennis game? Allow me to put it into some perspective: when Top Spin 4 came out in 2011, Ash Barty was a teenager still playing junior tennis tournaments. Cut to the present day and she’s won three grand slams, reached the women’s world number one ranking, and retired from the sport altogether -- and still the wait continues for a high quality serve and volley simulation to emerge as the heir to Top Spin 4’s throne. Matchpoint - Tennis Championships is the latest contender, and although it may be slightly lacking in terms of licensing and customisation, it certainly seems to have a lot of potential where it really counts -- out on the court.

Matchpoint just feels good in the hand. The controls are uncluttered and feel extremely responsive, and it only took me a couple of matches on the default semi-pro difficulty to get a good handle on balancing the energetic dashes and pivots of my player with the more subtle steering of the shot reticle. Each point played is also satisfyingly fluid; developer Torus Games claims that over 1,300 unique motion-capture animations are being employed and it shows, there’s a seamlessness between shots that imbues Matchpoint’s rallies with a level of realism that’s been lacking in other tennis games in recent years.

The only aspect that feels as though it requires further tuning ahead of launch is the serving, which at present seems a touch too accurate. I quickly found that I was able to land every serve on a dime like Pete Sampras in his prime, bombing them out wide or down the tee with precision and routinely finishing each match with 100 percent of first serves in. This seemed noticeably out of balance with the general