Top Spin 2

"A better substitute for Wimbledon."

Silence on the court. Tim Henman is on the final serve. Obviously 1 set down. He needs to make this serve to win. The crowd knows how important it is. You can hear a pin drop. He starts to make the serve and out of nowhere comes a voice shouting “Come on Tim” he messes up and that's the end of Wimbledon for another year. We know this is the story every year; our hopes are up, yet something always seems to go wrong. Now is your chance to change that, make your player and rise through the ranks to become to World's greatest, welcome to Top Spin 2.

Top Spin 2 comes back with a bang with a totally different publisher to that on the original Xbox but keeping the original developer team things can only get better (now that I found you). Based around the game of Tennis it aims for realism rather than Arcade play and man is it great. With no competition really on the Xbox 360 it has found a nice little niche yet manage to grab most of the 360 players at the same time.

There are 3 modes of play; Exhibition, Career and of course Xbox Live play. Career is where you will probably start out your life in Top Spin 2, jumping straight into Live play will result in a proper beating. You should leave that to the Professionals for a while.

Career mode is where all the fun as it. It follows the story of your life from your humble beginnings as a Rookie Tennis player up to being ranked number 1 in the world. Of course cutting out the story bits and leaving you pure tennis fun. Put together a lot better than the previous Top Spin where everything is mashed together and it leaves you confused as to what to do next. This follows a sequential pattern week by week giving you the options of Training, a Tournament or a special event. Of course at times you will be forced to do one which you may not want to do, depending on your World ranking or the amount of money that you currently have. At times you will be invited to compete in Special Events such as a doubles tournament at a local tennis club.

During your first year most of your time will be spent training to build up your skills to make yourself a winner. If you have ever played Training in the original Top Spin at times you may have found it a little tedious and just as a way to grab your skill points. However in Top Spin 2 as soon as you start you will discover that not only is the training a way go gain skill points it is also extremely fun and teaches you something. There is a lot of variety from knocking over a brick wall with your tennis balls or hitting a box across the court to work on your power. It actually requires skill to complete these training sessions, you aren't going to complete just by randomly smacking the ball like me when I head to the gym.

After training you will be ready to take on the world and take part in some tournaments. No matter the amount of skill points that you have it is still challenging to complete them. Most of the time it will be a very close match right up to the last shot (especially in the final) keeping the tension going and you interested right up until the last second, this makes the game extremely addictive. This defiantly fixes a downside to the original Top Spin where you could easily win every match without moving anywhere causing for some people horrendous boredom, of course Top Spin is still regarded as one of the better games on the original Xbox and rightly so.

Risk Shots are not such an important factor in Top Spin 2, sure you can use them, but they are extremely hard to execute and will result in early baldness due to the stress it causes. However if used correctly you can recreate some great Tennis matches rather than just hammering A over and over in a game so boring you would rather watch Big Brother.

Finally in this little section I move onto controls. If you have played the original Top Spin you will find them so intuitive (but then again they are exactly the same) I decided to put the controls to a test and handed the control over to my little sister. She wasn't quite winning (back to Tim Henman scenario) yet she did grasp the controls with little help from me. Casually snatching back the controller I pulled her back from the brink of losing. Of course the controls may be intuitive yet you must know when to use each shot (i.e. lobbing when your opponent is close to the net) so rather than the game based on how well you know the controls it is more focused on skill. As the saying goes it is quick to learn the controls, but to master them takes a lifetime. Ok, maybe there really wasn't a saying but you catch my drift.

Moving onto Graphics, I can sum these up in one word, but I won't. I aim to write a few paragraphs on this. You have the option to create your player in career mode. Not just a run of the mill player that you select from a choice, but a full-blown character creation. Although not on par with the EA Sports creators still pretty mind-blowing and you can put together some pretty nice combinations; how does a top tennis player sound? Or even that bloke on Sky News that does the weather. The choice is up to you and most of the time you will be able to create people that you wish or pretty similar.

The court is where most of the game is set. Each court has a unique feel to it. You can actually feel what country you are in. Peering through the fences of a minor tournament in England you can see life just casually taken place without you. People ride their bikes; joggers run past and occasionally peer through the fence to watch you. I did find this a bit rude and I wouldn't dream of doing it at my local Tennis court, but he was cheering on me, so who can blame him. In a stark contrast to this you can head right over to play in a Mexican hotel tennis court and feel the heat beaming down onto the court, and people sitting in shorts and t-shirts on rocky seats. That's what Tennis is about, not your full-blown major tournaments like Wimbledon but the minors. These are the people that care about Tennis and don't play for the money.

Looking at the clothes of your player you can see that they move freely in the wind and move like you would expect clothes to move, rather than stiff and hard like some games have down recently. However I do have a gripe with the graphics, that is when creating my player I set him to have Brown hair but over the course of the career it changed to Ginger, whether this was a crafty bit of programming where the sunlight affects you hair colour or that the light source wasn't reflected properly on the hair I do not know, but I had to put up with a lot of questions about why my hair colour was set to Ginger when apparently I could have chosen a better colour.

After playing through career mode you will want to take your champion player online to face the masses. At the time of writing it is fairly hard to find matches except against people with totally maxed out players or so good that you don't stand a hope in beating them. Online play takes a lot more skill than standard career mode, not because you are up against (partially) intelligent people, but there has been research into what builds of players most suit Xbox Live play. Of course this research is currently only in Internet forums and not really valid however if true then matches could be determined right before the off.

The achievements are the one thing I don't like about Xbox 360 games, of course it was a good idea. However not enough thought has been placed in some games for people to gather them. However although some achievements are remarkably easy to achieve such as winning an exhibition match but others are ridiculously hard or time consuming e.g. Winning 25 Ranked matches online, which actually takes a lot longer than you think. This strikes the perfect balance for casual players to achieve their points and the hardcore gamers. Nice work on the achievements here.

This game will last you a long time. After your career mode is complete you will want to play through it again as a different character build or just a quick party game with a couple of your mates. These is also a new addition to the series and cause some intense fun and a lot of drunken nights. A lot of debate recently as to whether people should buy Top Spin 2 or Table Tennis. My suggestion? Take both. You won't regret it. They both play totally differently and are fun in their own ways. Ignore the Tennis season, play this instead. Will be so much more fun then watching people hit balls to each other for hours on end. Top Game.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 05/30/06