I don’t know why tennis fans are so unlucky. Without a doubt, one of the smartest and most popular sports in the world has gone years without a quality video game adaptation. Funny to say, but the smartest thing is that it’s adapted on the Nintendo Switch, but it’s not what true connoisseurs might dream of. This means that fans have been waiting and waiting, but neither the Tennis World Tour nor the AO Tennis have been a revelation. So Torus Australia and publisher Kalypso Media raised the issue. Theirs Match Points: Tennis Championship promised to be the long-awaited breakthrough – and did not become.

developer:
Torus Games

Price:
$39.99

Football, basketball, Formula 1 and many other popular sports have received expensive adaptations that look high quality and boast all the relevant licenses. Tennis is a bit of a mess: there’s no FIFA here with nearly all the essential licenses, and most often the developers get the rights to a single tournament or in general to some pathetic scrap. I do not know why. Developers changed, so did publishers, and the results were just mediocre.

At first glance, Matchpoint: Tennis Championships appears to be the same kind of breakthrough. First of all, the novelty pleased the animation – a perennial problem for budget predecessors, in which the player twitched convulsively during each stroke. Here you can see that a lot of work has been done, and from some angles there are even claims to photorealism. But on the other hand, there is not enough money for everything else. Not even a doubles match!

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The main thing is the gameplay – it barely surpasses Mario Tennis Aces in terms of difficulty; here also the type of impact depends on which button you press. The main thing is not strategy but reaction speed, although improved animations allow you to predict the actions of your opponent. In motion, Matchpoint: Tennis Championships looks great, even fun. Well, first.

After a few hours you will start to notice everything here there isn’t any. Licenses, famous tournaments, famous players… and, most importantly, the atmosphere. Well, license, but where is the passion, drama, and tragedy — elements without which tennis is unimaginable? Players lose emotion or character, and winning means nothing to them, just like losing. The stands also seemed to be staring at their smartphones and not interested in the action.

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If you watch tennis, you know how important the smallest wins are for tennis players. How important is motivation and psychology. These are all points that have touched soccer sims over the years, but Matchpoint: Tennis Championships offered us the bare minimum and hope that we would have enough. But what good is tennis if there is no emotion? Like movies, video games are illusions that make us mortals feel like gods on the field, but not here. From the outside, my complaints may seem trivial, but maybe you and I just view tennis differently.

Match Point: Tennis Championships also has problems with progression: the career mode is very long, player development is slow, and, again, the game doesn’t evoke any emotions. I’m glad there’s an online component, and a cross-platform component. For some, this is already a reason to buy.

Decision

Match Points: Tennis Championship — the best tennis simulator for many years, but even such a favorable assessment does not save anything new. This is still a very low budget attempt to bring tennis into the world of video games. Unfortunately, in 2022, the 4-year-old Top Spin 11 remains the benchmark.

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