Review: Tennis World Tour 2

We have an international team but most of us from LifeisXbox are from Belgium. A country that has a rich history with Tennis, and we have a return of Kim Clijsters. which isn’t precisely going as hoped and that’s the exact feeling for Tennis World Tour 2. We have some incredible tennis games on Xbox 360 but nowadays they don’t reach that greatness anymore. This sequel to the atrocious first Tennis World Tour is a lot better now. To my relief, the first one was a constant double fault. Tennis World Tour 2 gets past the serve but is still far away from an ace.

We played Tennis World Tour 2 for 5 hours on Xbox One X

What we liked!

• Visually great and clear menus: The first impression is everything and while starting Tennis World Tour 2 you get the impression that you’re going to get a fantastic Tennis-experience. the menus welcome you with astonishing in-action pictures from real-life tennis-stars. The urge to take control is sky high and really pushes the sense of taking control.
• A decent roster of playable stars: More than 30 licensed Tennis stars can pick up the racket. The game misses some high-placed stars, Djokovic for example but they covered the basic needs of some famous players. Ashleigh Barty, Rafael Nadal, Federer, and the Belgian chouchou David Goffin are all playable. It is always a lot more fun to play as your favorite or to see familiar faces on the court.
• A basic Career mode: Create a player and win to become number 1 on the ATP Rankings, that’s your goal and that’s going to take hundreds of matches and many hours. You can select to play tournaments, you can decide to train yourself or to give your body some much-needed rest. It doesn’t really give much new but the basics are good enough. A card system to improve some aspects of your play brings some original ideas but it isn’t drastic enough to really change the core gameplay.

Somewhere between

• Everything feels like it was made with minimal effort: I couldn’t shake my impression that Tennis World Tour 2 is a game with minimal effort. The audio is nothing worth mentioning, the visuals are .. funny, the gameplay is average and everything feels a bit bare-bones. while everything is definitely better than the first one it isn’t what you would expect from a licensed sports game, it simply isn’t good enough. Tennis fans will find some enjoyment but this is far from fun like how it was with Top Spin or Virtua Tennis.

What we disliked

• Is my Xbox One plugged in or is it the Xbox 360? Visually Tennis World Tour 2 is a mess, there are no soothing words for it. The tennis stars look like Playmobil models with terrible facial expressions. The odd and weird animations totally break immersion too. How they seem to teleport dash to hard to reach balls is like watching a Mr. Bean sketch or something. The only thing that is worth mentioning is that the court has some nice details but that is rendered useless with the ugly crowds and referees.
• Controls are simply weird: Why are movement and shot direction on the same stick? It makes zero sense! Aiming your ball and placing it in the opposite direction on the court is hard and confusing when you have to move your character too. In the heat of a rally, it is often impossible to place the ball where you want as you barely have the time to move your character to the left and aim your ball to the right. This mechanic is broken and I simply don’t understand that this isn’t something that the developers noticed while test-playing Tennis World Tour 2. How you swing is done as expected so no complaints about that, a drop-shot or a spin ball is easily done. I am mentioning this as some other recent tennis games did some outlandish stuff with that.

CONCLUSION

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