The biggest issue I had with the mode was the fact that mandates that you play the first year of the career mode on the easiest difficulty and ratchets one difficulty level up each year. You have the opportunity to take part in rivalry matches as well as training. Each year you have eight tournaments that you can take part in the four grand slams, and four tune ups.
The big game mode in Grand Slam Tennis 2 is the career mode which allows you to create a tennis player and take him/her through a ten year career. Luckily EA allows you to use the face buttons which for ground strokes I found to be far more responsive. The system is far to touchy and the difference between a beautiful cross court shot that glides off the baseline to a dinky short shot is extremely small. The other big issue is timing which is crucial for making sure your shots have any sort of pace or depth. Why my less than stellar take on the controls? Well first off the accuracy of using the right analog stick doesn’t give you as much control over your shots as you would expect. By hitting one of the trigger buttons you can then hit a lob or drop shot. Depending on how you flick the stick on ground strokes will either be a flat shot, top spin, or slice. This works well, but it’s the ground strokes where certain things start to break up. Serving is done as you would expect, pull back on the right analog stick, and push forward. In my humble opinion after hours and hours of time with the game I find it to be one of the game’s biggest failures. In fact the most conflicting portion of Grand Slam Tennis 2 has to be its controls which depending on who you talk to are either the game’s best or worst feature. Instead the developers have adopted analog stick controls very similar to what you would find in EA’s Fight Night series.
Now we have Grand Slam Tennis 2 (absent from the Wii) which for the Xbox 360 which I am reviewing the game for is completely without motion controls altogether. So does Grand Slam Tennis 2 have what it take to compete with the reigning king Top Spin 4?ĮA’s first tennis outing in the Grand Slam Tennis franchise came on the Wii a few years back to critical success but then we never saw the Xbox 360 or Playstation 3 versions of the game which were eventually cancelled.
So it will now come to you as no surprise that one of my most anticipated titles of the first half of 2011 was Grand Slam Tennis 2, EA’s first tennis outing on the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. It’s one of the few genres that to this day I get major butterflies inside when I hear that a new tennis video game is coming out. I would be doing everyone a disservice if I didn’t start my review of Grand Slam Tennis 2 by fully disclosing that I am a huge tennis fan.
0 kommentar(er)
