Matchpoint – Tennis Championships, as a starting point, is an engaging game for tennis and casual sports fans alike. Unfortunately, the game suffers from a lack of detail and customization, a sparse selection of tennis icons, and a gameplay system that gets old extremely quickly.
It comes with solid roots, but once you dive deep into the gameplay, you realize there isn’t much beyond the baseline. It opens well, with a control scheme that’s easy to understand and even better to master, but with a lack of depth beyond the basic controls, there’s not much to drag you back into. As a tennis fan I would like to be able to recommend Matchpoint – Tennis Championships to you, but unfortunately I can only recommend that you grab it at a discount, if even then.
Matchpoint – Tennis Championships presents itself as an arcade-style, yet realistic tennis simulator. In this it succeeds. Easy-to-use controls, a lively yet simple art style, and a few tweaks make this game more arcade-like than the complexity of the sport it imitates. Tennis is an extremely difficult sport to simulate as it requires different moves at any given time. The movement and footwork, the swing itself, the intended purpose of the ball; there is just so much to think about.
Therefore, it is impressive that Matchpoint manages to get the control scheme to a level that is easy to pick up and play. You push the stick to suggest a direction to your character (there is something of an aiming aid so suggesting a direction is enough to align your player with the ball), hold a button early to change your swing type decode and then use another stick to decide where the ball will land. It is an intuitive, easy to learn system that works very well. Unfortunately, there isn’t much to it, and other than hitting the ball as hard as you can across the court, there isn’t really a huge amount of variety in the strategies you can use to beat your opponents. When the rallies go on, things start to get a bit tedious, with you hitting the ball back to your opponent over and over again. With games taking so long, it feels like an obligation to finish a game, and in an arcade game it should never be difficult to finish a round.
This problem with what it feels like to play extensively leads to one of the biggest problems Matchpoint has in my opinion: Tennis Championships. It just doesn’t provide enough reason to play beyond the first few games. After playing through the career mode openings, you are faced with improving your skills through training exercises, all of which are incredibly complete exercises in patience. You are then led to play against many different opponents for trophies you never see, so the sense of reward is significantly reduced.
The lack of big names is also extremely noticeable, with just a few (including cover star Nick Kyrgios and several other notables like Daniil Medvedev) spanning your entire career journey. It all gets boring and repetitive eventually. When the gameplay lacks depth and the matches drag on, playing Matchpoint – Tennis Championships becomes a drag in itself. That’s a huge problem when it presents itself as a colorful simulation arcade game.
The lack of options the game offers is another issue. With a barebones multiplayer structure that essentially boils down to singles matches against randoms, AI, or friends, there’s not much to bite into here. When the career mode is done, you’ll probably be tired of taking on the AI, but there’s no mode to take on randoms other than the standard singles. No doubles, no tournament, nothing. It’s a huge disappointment, again for a game that presents itself as arcade, with very little to play that is actually arcade-esque.
Customization is a bit on the lean side. There’s a pretty basic character customization system at the start of the career mode, which allows for a bit of facial customization and a few basic clothing options. My biggest problem with customization is that there is a limited selection of the advertised gear from companies like Nike, Adidas and Babolat. It’s a shame, because with a third-person game in such a heavily sponsored sport, and seeing the licensed pros you play against wearing full outfits from popular brands, we couldn’t have gotten the same amount of choice. Most of the clothes you can choose from are unbranded, giving them a cheap, generic look that doesn’t help the player feel like your own clothes. Heavy customization would also have added to the satisfaction of playing the career mode, coupled with the skill system to create a more satisfying progression arc. We can only hope that more options will be added in the future as the game grows and becomes more popular.
However, what undermines Matchpoint – Tennis Championships the most is the lack of difficulty. Once you get the hang of the controls, every opponent seems to be stuck in easy mode. It’s as simple as just playing shot after shot until they make a mistake. In the career it is possible to build up stats such as your accuracy and strength through exercises, but these exercises are completely boring and since your accuracy was almost perfect in the beginning I never saw the point of increasing it any more to build. I did build up my net worth quite a bit though and that seemed to make quite a difference but to be honest I could have beaten career mode at my starting power level. The higher your power, the more likely a winner will succeed, but since most shots, if timed correctly, are winners anyway, hitting rocket after rocket isn’t hard. I think Matchpoint – Tennis Championships manages the basics to perfection with its control scheme, but it just never manages to push the player deeper than that, which is why the gameplay feels flat, rather like the presentation.
The presentation of Matchpoint – Tennis Championships is shiny and colorful, but I wouldn’t say it’s particularly appealing. It lacks details and the players look unrealistic as they move around the field. It’s not an ugly game, as the graphics feel fairly modern, but it’s certainly not a pretty game either, with a lack of detail and use of bright, high-contrast colors, the blue of the tennis court and the yellow-green ball almost collide.
Face details on opponents are decent if they’re an icon player rather than a generic opponent, but the crowd seems to be almost completely identical. Something not unheard of in sports games – I’m looking at you eFootball 2022 – yet disappointing.
I come away from Matchpoint – Tennis Championships somewhat saddened. I was expecting a brilliant tennis game, with short, arcade-style matches that I could enjoy alone or with friends. The problem is I would never try to get my friends to play this because firstly they would be bored before the end of a match, and secondly the games would never end because we would be hitting the ball to each other again and again; the game lacks the required skills and shots to beat the other opponent.
The career mode also disappoints, with genetic opponents filling the ranks of people you must be the best on your journey to stardom. Multiplayer is bare-bones, with much of the content we’d expect from a tennis game missing. The only thing I can praise Matchpoint – Tennis Championships for is that it has the basics down to the service line, with easy to understand, quick to learn controls that make it easy to pick up and play – but it needs to be deeper. However, the missing content and lack of ways to use this intuitive system disappoint, and in the end Matchpoint – Tennis Championships is less of a winning smash and more of a missed drop shot.
Matchpoint – Tennis Championships is available from the Xbox store
Matchpoint – Tennis Championships, as a starting point, is an engaging game for both tennis and casual sports fans. Unfortunately, the game suffers from a lack of detail and customization, a sparse selection of tennis icons, and a gameplay system that gets old extremely quickly. It comes with solid roots, but once you dive deep into the gameplay, you realize there isn’t much beyond the baseline. It opens well, with a control scheme that is easy to understand and even better to master, but with a lack of depth beyond the basic controls, there isn’t much to…
Matchpoint – Tennis Championships Review
Matchpoint – Tennis Championships Review
2022-07-30
George Sweetnam
Advantages:
- Easy to pick up and play
- Helpful Beginner’s Guide
- Modern, sleek graphics and performance
cons:
- Lack of depth in gameplay
- Multiplayer mode seriously lacks content
- Art style is too simplistic and cartoonish
Information:
- Huge thanks for the free copy of the game go to – Kalypso Media
- Formats – Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PS4, PS5, PC
- Version Reviewed – Xbox Series X
- Release Date – July 7, 2022
- Introductory price from – £44.99
TXH score
2.5/5
Advantages:
- Easy to pick up and play
- Helpful Beginner’s Guide
- Modern, sleek graphics and performance
cons:
- Lack of depth in gameplay
- Multiplayer mode seriously lacks content
- Art style is too simplistic and cartoonish
Information:
- Huge thanks for the free copy of the game go to – Kalypso Media
- Formats – Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PS4, PS5, PC
- Version Reviewed – Xbox Series X
- Release Date – July 7, 2022
- Introductory price from – £44.99
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