Tennis World Tour 2 Review: Tennis Fans Deserve More

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Tennis World Tour 2 allows you to “cheat” at the game, which feels like it's missing the point. Just like the 2018 poorly-received original, Tennis World Tour 2 features a variety of “skill cards” that can be activated during matches, allowing you to boost your player's values or even affect your opponent's attributes for a limited time. You can reduce their shot or serve precision, while improving yours. Moreover, these skill cards are found in packs that you must buy with in-game currency, just as with FIFA Ultimate Team. At least you can't buy in-game currency this time around, unlike the microtransactions model present in the first Tennis World Tour game.

Still, it's terrible game design — and worse, it's entirely unnecessary. Just look at FIFA. EA Sports discovered that most players never made use of “training items” (found in Ultimate Team packs), which worked in a similar manner to Tennis World Tour's “skill cards”. And after years of player feedback, EA is finally getting rid of them in FIFA 21. There's no need for Tennis World Tour 2 to continue with an outdated model. You could simply ignore the entire system, but naturally there's no getting around it when you're up against the AI or even other humans online. Tennis World Tour 2 doesn't allow you to disable skill cards either, no matter what game mode you're playing.

Speaking of game modes, Tennis World Tour 2 also offers doubles tennis this time around, which was missing from the original game. It's a lot of fun, especially to see how quickly AI players react to each other's shots. Four human players can play locally on the same device, or two players on two different machines online. Weirdly, you can't connect four consoles or PCs together on Tennis World