Grand Slam Tennis 2

 PlayStation 3
Metascore
73

Mixed or average reviews - based on 36 Critic Reviews

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 18 out of 36
  2. Mixed: 18 out of 36
  3. Negative: 0 out of 36
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  1. PSFocus
    Feb 20, 2012
    73
    EA's first attempt at a tennis game doesn't manage to live up to its main concurrents, the main letdowns being a lack of players, an uneven difficulty and incredibly repetitive commentary tracks. A third game in the series might fix most of these problems though.
  2. Cheat Code Central
    Feb 16, 2012
    72
    I wouldn't necessarily recommend it to anyone other than existing tennis fans. However, if you just so happen to be a tennis aficionado and you want an alternative to some of the other tennis games on the market, Grand Slam Tennis does just fine.
  3. Official PlayStation Magazine Benelux
    Mar 4, 2012
    71
    Underneath all the unforced errors there's some entertaining gameplay to discover. We battled out numerous exciting sets filled with well placed slices and top spins. It doesn't take much effort to dish out some impressive and varied moves. [March 2012, p.96]
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  5. Armchair Empire
    Jun 18, 2012
    70
    GST2 is a solid effort, but falls short in several areas. The career mode, opponent AI and presentation still need to be fine tuned. If EA can sort out these issues then there's no doubt GST3 could be the new Grand Slam Champion of tennis.
  6. Eurogamer Portugal
    Mar 21, 2012
    70
    Grand Slam Tennis 2 is an offer that presents its own merits and reveals EA Sports interest in getting close to other series that mark the genre.
  7. Playstation Official Magazine Australia
    Mar 4, 2012
    70
    Not without problems but surprisingly addictive once you get the rhythm down pat. [March 2012, p75]
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  8. Gamestyle
    Feb 21, 2012
    70
    Planning on spending time online? Spend some hours in Career mode and a few more on the practice court and you're on your way to greatness. Staying offline? Unless you're happy with a tragically uneven Career mode, you're better off perusing other options for the virtual tennis court.
  9. Eurogamer
    Feb 10, 2012
    70
    If Virtua Tennis is Nadal - bright, consistent, unafraid to work up a sweat - and Top Spin has the measured elegance of a Federer, Grand Slam Tennis is every bit the Andy Murray of tennis games: flashes of brilliance, prone to a few too many errors, but shows definite champion potential.
  10. Playstation: The Official Magazine (US)
    Feb 8, 2012
    70
    GST2 doesn't yet match up to its main tennis rival, but it still has game. [Mar 2012, p.85]
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  11. AusGamers
    Feb 9, 2012
    66
    If you're looking for some light-hearted swing and miss fun with your mates then this is certainly worth a look, particularly if you've got a couple of PlayStation Move controllers lying beside your couch, but if you're looking for the definitive tennis experience Grand Slam Tennis 2 is lacking compared to other more established offerings.
  12. 4P.de
    Feb 10, 2012
    65
    Game set and match EA? Not really. Loads of official licences are not enough to replace the lack of a decent challenge on the court. It's still better than Virtua Tennis 4 though.
  13. GameSpot
    Feb 9, 2012
    65
    Good visuals and accessible controls can't mask Grand Slam Tennis 2's weak career mode.
  14. Gamer.no
    Mar 9, 2012
    60
    Grand Slam Tennis 2 is EA Sports' attempt to dominate yet another sports genre, but the title faces hard rivalry in the existing Virtua Tennis and Top Spin series. The game features a nice selection of official stadiums and competitions, but does not really present anything new of interest that has not already been done by the competition. Still, the implementation of Move functionality is promising, and together with a solid online service it should lead to some interest from fans of the genre.
  15. Giant Bomb
    Feb 22, 2012
    60
    It's damn hard to talk about video game tennis without bringing up Virtua Tennis, particularly when a game, like Grand Slam Tennis 2, hems so close to that original arcade formula. It's a facsimile that's executed well enough; there just aren't any good reasons to recommend Grand Slam Tennis 2 over the games that it cribs from.
  16. PSX Extreme
    Feb 16, 2012
    60
    Technical elements aren't impressive. Career setup is annoying and unrealistic. Gameplay isn't anywhere near authentic enough. Move functionality isn't quite right. General lack of solidarity and consistency.
  17. PlayStation Universe
    Feb 16, 2012
    60
    Sadly the game's lack of substance, fuelled by its inability to carve out its own personality, is hard to overlook. From a presentation perspective it's by far the best looking tennis game on PS3, but that's not enough to ensure repeated investment.
  18. Gameblog.fr
    Feb 10, 2012
    60
    Grand Slam Tennis 2 seems more realistic than the original, thanks to its revised visuals, but don't let it fool you : it's still an arcade tennis game. The AI is full of stereotypes, and even though there's loads of game modes, it will be most enjoyable when played online against humans. The PS Move gameplay works well.
  19. VideoGamer
    Feb 10, 2012
    60
    It has neither the depth of Top Spin nor the excitement of Virtua Tennis, and is bizarrely inferior to its predecessor in almost every way.

Awards & Rankings

88
#88 Best PS3 Game of 2012

User Reviews

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User Score
5.4

Mixed or average reviews- based on 20 Ratings

User score distribution:
  1. Positive: 6 out of 20
  2. Mixed: 5 out of 20
  3. Negative: 9 out of 20
  1. Madmaz
    Feb 14, 2012
    3
    Dont buy this game..Get Top Spin 4 or Virtual Tennis 4..on the surface of it it looks like a good game..lots of real players , all 4 grandDont buy this game..Get Top Spin 4 or Virtual Tennis 4..on the surface of it it looks like a good game..lots of real players , all 4 grand slam events, the ability to create your own player complete with game face. But the heart of the game the Career is awful. Compared to Top Spin 4 its severely lacking , not half as many smaller tournaments of competitions to enter and Top Spin 4' s player progression is much more advanced than this. Ok you might say thats ok I can live with that, and I agree but the one thing which absolutely kilss this game is they way they have done the Ai difficulty in the career. Instead of you choosing what lever you'd like to play on ie easy, normal, hard, they have done so you start your career on the easy level for 2/3 seasons then it goes up to normal then after a few more seasons it goes up again, so you end up on legendary difficulty in the final part of your career which means that in the first year you can WIN ALL THE GRAND SLAMS COZ THE AI IS ON EASY!!...hello??..where is the logic in that!?..so you dont really bother after that!..the game play itself is ok , but its on rails ..impossible to put the ball out....Poor effort by EA..the demo sold me this game, but the final product is rubbish..avoid at all costs. Get Top Spin 4 for a tennis game that will keep you coming back.… Full Review »
  2. Brak
    Sep 5, 2012
    3
    This game has some really entertaining game play/mechanics, looking at it strictly from the standpoint of what you do when you're in a match.This game has some really entertaining game play/mechanics, looking at it strictly from the standpoint of what you do when you're in a match. The controls strike a good balance between simplicity and sophistication.* The commentary is entertaining, if a little repetitive over time. It can be fun to play.

    And that's where my positives end, because for whatever time EA Sports spent in game mechanics, they seemingly spent no time whatsoever in the orchestration of the user experience across the different modes and usage patterns. Here are some examples of how the user experience off the court completely falls down.

    The navigation through screens, modes, transitions, etc., is quite simply the worst and most unintuitive I've used in a game in as long as I can remember. Navigation options are often incredibly difficult to decipher, based on their descriptions (i.e. "Okay, so what to I click on now?"), and most of the time, once you do figure them out, don't make any real sense at all from an intuitiveness standpoint. And the accompanying help screens? EA, you may as well have just written "TODO" on each page of documentation, for all of the lack of value of the sparse information presented. Simply awful, not production quality at all. Somebody-should-be-fired awful. It took quite a while of playing and navigating, with trial and error, to figure out what you should and shouldn't do.

    The career mode is unbelievably unrealistic and decidedly unrewarding. The first two years of your career are a total cakewalk. I lost one match in the entire 24 months of play. Then I stepped into the first match of the third year, and couldn't take more than a game from the lowest chump on the ladder. There's a complete disconnect and inconsistency in CPU player experience, from match to match.

    What's more, there's nothing particularly rewarding about winning. You collect these "yearly" and "career-long" goal accomplishments that translate into "points", but the points have absolutely no bearing on how well your follow-up skills and games are going to progress. They may occasionally coincide with an enhanced racket or some attribute points, but then again you're never clear in the beginning about whether you should even play the exhibition matches (which are the only ones to yield these improvements), since it's an either/or proposition to playing in the tournament going on at the same time (the either/or proposition is something you have to find out by trial and error). And at first glance it looks like you're on a yearly quest to achieve some laundry list of win objectives that conflict with other goals, only to figure out later that all of those objectives just carry over into the next year after year anyway, if you didn't complete them in the year specified. What?

    The worst part about this player feedback/improvement system, to me, is the fact that you don't develop better skills by virtue of playing (and winning). You can only up-level your skills by "training", or winning "special" (exhibition) matches. It's completely divorced from reality, which to me isn't a good quality in a reality simulator. What's also totally unrealistic, with respect to following real tennis as a fan, is that your "rank" improvements are entirely tied to this independent point-gathering system, which has nothing to do with the players you're playing (only the position in the tournament at which you face them). The end result is that, after two years and 8 Grand Slam wins in a row, I end up ranked 25th. What? And in the end, who cares? Because none of the players you play against have any meaningful ranking at all, let alone a ranking that measures against your own. What? The point system is entirely meaningless.

    This game has production-quality mechanics. The rest of it, from story to navigation to incentives, is quite simply an afterthought, and in no way resembles a production-quality experience. If you care about the progression of your games, as opposed to simply playing to play, this game is not going to be for you, by a wide margin.

    *Postscript: I found the Playstation Move controls to be unusable on this game. If you're looking for a great physically active PS Move game, this isn't the game for you.    … Full Review »
  3. ReallyNotNeeded
    Jul 29, 2017
    4
    I wouldn't recommend this tennis game.
    Grand Slam Tennis 2 was the first Playstation tennis game I played, and yes, to begin with, it was a    I wouldn't recommend this tennis game.
    Grand Slam Tennis 2 was the first Playstation tennis game I played, and yes, to begin with, it was a lot of fun. There is a variety of game modes, including Exhibition matches, tournaments, training, and finally career mode.
    The first three in that list, (Exhibition, tournaments and training) are great to start off with, but once you've done it a few times, it's boring and repetitive.
    However, career mode is diabolical. Your star can play for ten seasons, with each getting progressively harder. The first season is set to the easiest difficulty, which is Rookie. And even for beginner players, this is far too easy, and for the first 8 (ish) hours you win every match you play (and some would be against the likes of Roger Federer and Serena Williams) and the only way you would lose is if you did it on purpose.
    In the next season of your career, it does get better. The CPU is more advanced, but it still seems too easy to win Grand Slams and other tournaments, and if you are fairly good at this game, you'll find you'll have quite a tally after a few seasons.
    Eventually, it does get to be quite challenging, and can give a lot of entertainment. But by then, you've been playing for a long time, with few things to actually challenge you.
    On the more positive side, the players look very realistic, and the movement looks good (Although occasionally the players almost teleport to the ball to return it, but it can be funny.)
    There is also an option on the main menu and when you start a career to make your own tennis player. This is brilliant. There's so many ways to make your player different, and so many options to make him/her personal to you. You can even download tennis players made by other people.
    To conclude, I think you would be better off buying a different tennis game like Top Spin 4, as Grand Slam Tennis gets boring and repetitive so easily, and the career mode just isn't worth playing.
    Thanks for reading !    … Full Review »
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