Matchpoint: Tennis Championships

Matchpoint - Tennis Championships is an odd game. It's the best tennis game in recent years, but it's really discouraging to see how much it lacks a final polishing.

Graphically expandable tennis with few options and a lame career - but this sports game has its strong moments on the court.

Quotation forthcoming.

Does Matchpoint: Tennis Championships do anything particularly noteworthy? Not really. It’s not overly impressive in any way, being perfectly honest. But by simply providing a fun and fairly authentic game of tennis it manages to outshine its rivals. And because of that, whether you’re buying it to get stuck into its single-player career mode or take on all-comers in online multiplayer, chances are you won’t be disappointed.

Matchpoint – Tennis Championships is great if you want tennis, and nothing but tennis. It’ll give you ample opportunity to play match after match, and it never bogs you down in the extraneous nonsense that seems to plague most sports games. But if you want to do literally anything more than that, you might find your attention wavers long before you come close to finishing your career.

Despite a good initial impression, Matchpoint Tennis Championships ultimately failed to capture us in the long run. The lackluster career mode, a below average shot-system and the underwhelming license package, took a good effort sadly to the graveyard.

Matchpoint Tennis Championships is a game of two halves. While the actual moment-to-moment gameplay feels great thanks to well-implemented mechanics and challenging AI, everything supporting that structure is half-baked.

Matchpoint: Tennis Championships gives you the tools to play realistic tennis rallies, and it feels pretty good on the pad overall. The problem is that a real lack of enthusiasm on court pairs with a stodgy career mode to sap your enthusiasm. There’s fun to be had here, and a large animation library allows the gameplay to look relatively realistic from afar, but tennis fans will still have to wait for a real winner to topple the legendary Top Spin 4.

Matchpoint: Tennis Championships shows all its limits after just a few matches. There are some interesting ideas but, considering the poor A.I and the lack of game modes, there is no reason to play this game for more than a few hours.

If you’re looking for an hour or two of simple, easy to win tennis, grab Matchpoint Tennis Championships when it goes on sale. Otherwise, give this one a miss.

Matchpoint has a solid foundation gameplay-wise… but that’s it. It probably needs another year in development to become what we could consider a final product.

If Matchpoint Tennis had just thrown the occasional loss at me, or even let me fight back from behind at times, I would have spent so much more time playing the game. It’s unfortunate to think that here we have a tennis game that developers should be paying close attention to, because it gets so much right, and we know that won’t happen because one critical error means I have no choice but to score it the way I have. If, down the track, there’s a patch to improve the difficulty in an interesting way, then Matchpoint would be the best tennis game currently available, purely because the on-court gameplay actually gets it.

What it has made here could be considered impressive, in a way, considering its lack of expertise in this genre, because it’s not entirely incompetent. The tennis does play fairly realistically and there is a rhythm to it that did remind me of Virtua Tennis 2 at times. But I'm not sure that you'll want to spend your hours with this game, because it’ll seem like time will slow down to a crawl.

We were expecting a pure and hard tennis simulation, but Matchpoint Tennis Championships is really just an arcade game that doesn't even measure up to the first Virtua Tennis. The gameplay is poor and limited, the game is visually ugly, and the online mode often drags. A pure disaster.