EA Sports Grand Slam Tennis 2 Review [XBox 360]

rating:4.5

The prospect of launching a comparatively new tennis title is effectively like taking on the might of FIFA and Pro Evo - such is the monopoly of Virtua Tennis and Top Spin - but if there is one company who you can likely trust, it's EA Sports. The company has previous of course, and can count themselves as market leaders in the world of sports gaming, but tennis has always been a more difficult prospect. So could the EA brand extend its quality to the clay and grass courts? Well, somewhat typically, Grand Slam Tennis 2 bears all of the hallmarks of EA Sports excellence: slick presentation frames professionally built environments and impressive, realistic gameplay. There is something of a departure from the first game, which announced the arrival of the Motion Plus add-on on the Wii, with a move towards more deep gaming and a style that falls somewhere between simulation and unbounded arcade fun. Likenesses are good, and certainly an improvement on the original Wii version, but player action and specific behaviours are less impressive. Individualism in sports games is a difficult prospect, especially in FIFA or larger team sports, but tennis' smaller player pool should have provided the opportunity to concentrate more on recreating idiosyncracies in playing styles. There are flashes of excellence, when the game captures the player's essence, but they are unfortunately few and far between the largely generic animations. Thankfully, there hasn't been any skimping on the licensing costs, and players can choose from their favourite modern players, whether Djokovic or Nadal and classics of the games from cover star John McEnroe to Bjorn Borg and beyond. And most importantly of all is the inclusion of Wimbledon, a glaring omission from tennis gaming up until now, and one of Grand Slam's biggest bargaining chips. It isn't just EA's commitment to the right names, the right faces and the right venues that lend Grand Slam 2 its realistic gloss and its professionalism - the graphics are very, very good, and are almost enough to convince that what you're watching is live tennis on TV. Admittedly without masses of scrutiny anyway. And it would have to be a very bad day for the world's greatest tennis stars... But, character animations are great, movements realistic and fluid and the overall effect is an impressive one. The only hang-up I have at this stage is the same as I did with F1 2012 last year: precision does not always mean fun, and when sporting franchises get too deeply into the simulation world there can be a major drop off in how purely entertaining the gameplay is. Impressive yes, but not fundamentally enthralling. It doesn't tend to happen with the bigger spectator sports like football, hockey and American football, but more solitary sports like tennis and golf need something beyond realism to make them really spark. Having said that, there is still a lot to enjoy about Grand Slam 2: the control system, called Total Racket Control dictates play without the need for button-pressing. The demand set seems simple - push forward for flat shots, pull back for slices and flick forwards for top-spin, but Grand Slam's crowning glory is that EA Sports decided not to pander to gamers, offering a difficult to master system that requires some work, but it ultimately all the more rewarding for it. Too many games work on an effort/reward ratio system biased towards the latter, but EA Sports have continued to buck the trend after FIFA was criticised from some quarters for a new, complex defensive mechanic, and it takes some time to really master the controls enough to be an expert player. I want to be challenged as a player, and not spoon-fed like an idiot. There is a tutorial, led by John McEnroe, but it is still difficult to learn a control system that is fundamentally different to the way you've always played: akin to being told to play the strings of a piano instead of the keys. Responsiveness is thankfully spot on, though, so there is no frustration from developmental issues, and rather only your own inadequacies as a player. Cue imaginary racket smashing, and McEnroe style outbursts. Once you're out of the training mode, the difficulty setting drops quite dramatically, and even the first matches you enter seem simple in comparison to McEnroe's hurtful criticism during lesson time. But that can easily be remedied by changing the default difficulty settings to something a little more challenging: even with a whole new control system, you won't find a rewarding challenge or any realism until you take away the safety nets. But victory can be delightfully moreish, so playing one full season on default is marvellous for the ego. There are a pleasant number of game modes, and a lot of features, especially in the career mode which allows the player to create a new star player from scratch in the player creator, or do as I did and upload your own image using the developer's GameFace tools online. Hopefully, the results will be less horrifyingly Frankenstein-like for you. The mode is chocked-full of stats, matches and in-game challenges to aid player advancement through specific in-match objectives, and while none are particularly ground-breaking, EA's slick professionalism makes them all the more engrossing. Unfortunately, the only real failure for Grand Slam 2 is the audio side of things: the commentary from John McEnroe and Pat Cash is downright awful and riddled with repetition to a hugely annoying degree and the charismatic pair end up very quickly being unwelcome guests to your matches. But it's not a catastrophic short-coming, thanks to the volume button, and commentary was a legendary problem for EA titles, so we can give them some rope here. If I was looking to be particularly critical, the somewhat blatant presence of ESPN all over the game, including rather tastelessly on the front cover for no obvious reason other than marketing (EA surely don't need the authority by proxy?), but then vulgar advertising is part and parcel of major televised sports events these days. I just hope that cover advert isn't a prophecy of what might be to come. If FIFA is anything to go by, the Grand Slam franchise will go on to achieve greatness, and all of the problems above will no doubt be ironed out - and really, this early franchise addition (and console debut) is a damn fine starting point. At the same developmental stage, FIFA was riddled with errors - so while the game is good, there are signs that it could well go on to be a great title. There's certainly a lot of potential here anyway. It's a shame that the 360 version doesn't come with Kinect functionality (the game is PS3 Move enabled), as that would undoubtedly added an extra level to the gameplay. But then, it's not often PS3 users are given exclusive content these days.

Grand Slam Tennis 2 is released on 10th February on XBox 360 and PS3.