Re: Top Spin 3/Smash Court Tennis 3 Waiting thread - both hit stores June, 2008
OXM (Official Xbox360 Magazine) gives TS3 9/10
The full OXM review ...
"Tennis games have come a long way since Pong, but the last major landmark was Virtua Tennis on Dreamcast; games since then have just refined the concepts it debuted. Not this time, though- the fantastic Top Spin 3 is the next evolutionary step.
But at first, Top Spin 3 will **** you off. It sure didn't click with us during our brief hands-on time for our preview in last month's issue, but with the benefit of some 20/20 hindsight, we can assure you that it's just because Top Spin 3 masterfully turns tennis controls on their head. By focusing not on charging up but on getting your player into position and releasing your swing at the right moment, the control is loads more realistic, and it also requires more skill and finesse. Fortunately, the game helps you out with a great school more that runs you through every detail in 30-plus essential lessons.
It's definitely THAT tricky at first-for the first hour or so, you'll stare in disbelief as your ingrained charge-up-the-shot reflexes send easy balls zipping past you. But once you get in the groove and unleash your first he's-so-dead rocket, you'll start to appreciate how awesome the controls make the gameplay. Even doubles play or rushing the net feels different and harder in a good way, requiring mastery of their own respective timing and patterns.
See, there's no perfect arcade tennis here- you WILL crank the ball into the net on a regular basis, and if your positioning is off, the ball WILL comically bounce off your face. But rather than just shrugging off a bad dice roll on your charged-up shot, you'll learn to see that you swung too early, got too close to the ball, or misread the spin. All of this boils down to gameplay that is slower-paced, more realistic and lightyears more satisfying than Top Spin 2's, or anything with "Virtua" in it's name.
Top Spin 3 puts all this to fine use in terrific career and online modes, and gorgeous graphics and animations give you plenty of pretty to gawk at no matter where you play. While the career is the standard noob-to-god path, the structure isn't . You start out playing on a local playground, move up to more formal leagues at local colleges, and eventually earn an invite to the junior tour. Put in a good year there, and you can get invited to the pros and beyond. Challenge is everywhere you turn-at first, your rookie can barely hit the ball, so you have to hack out a win from the mess of his "skills." Then when you first make the juniors, everyone is so much better that it's almost daunting. But scratch out some XP here and there while studying your opponents' patterns, and your rank will climb in no time. Hey, if you want to pretend you can beat Federer with your pinkie, you can always go play an exhibition match on Easy.
On the online side, Top Spin 3 sadly fails to provide four-player doubles form four 360s, but the game takes the sting out of the disappointment with its nifty World Tour mode. Here you can enter a set of tournaments, and matchmaking puts you against an opponent who's reached the same round as you(quarters, semis, etc.). If you lose, you can't re-enter for two weeks-though you can play in ever-present one-off games-which puts actual meaning into the scrapping for leaderboard position.
Top Spin 3 might seem like it's testing your tolerance for sucking at a game. But there's no tilting at windmills-abundant gameplay riches and rewards are here, just waiting for you to mine them, and they make your inevitable triumph that much sweeter."