Review: Matchpoint – Tennis Championships reminds me of Top Spin 3

The basics of the game are fine. However, the scope, difficulty, mesh code, and presentation leave a lot to be desired.

How long has it been since really good tennis was played on PC or console? Neither AO Tennis nor the Tennis World Tour were really convincing and no matter how great the indie simulation Full Ace Tennis Simulator is: the eye eats with it, but has to starve there on the outstretched arm. That’s why my enthusiasm was limited when another challenger, Matchpoint, was announced and finally published last week – including in Game Pass, if you want to take a look as a Microsoft subscriber.

At least that’s what I did, and well, Matchpoint doesn’t exactly rip up trees. In fact, the game developed by Torus Games is a downright rudimentary outline of the actual sport. Because apart from the fact that you’re hurting yourself both online and offline and completing a career with a professional you created yourself, pretty much everything that makes great tennis is missing here.

A few licensed stars have found their way here, but only a few official places, tournaments and sponsors. Worse still, the referees’ announcements don’t have names, don’t even mention me as “Player One” and the mood curve of the commentator… To be honest: I had no idea that you could read every syllable of “This is crazy!” can speak in the exact same pitch. Many of his statements do not even fit the respective situation, and are sometimes even incorrect. The fact that he declares a set won 6:1 to be “hard work” and asks immediately after a game won whether I can make the break should at least not happen.

Apart from that, there are no run-ins, the serve movement of Nick Kyrgios is indistinguishable from that of all other athletes, the athletes are not even happy or angry after winning a match, there is no doubles – where match point is technically lagging behind and especially on the consoles doesn’t really look good, unfortunately it doesn’t make up for it with attention to detail.

It looks completely different on TV!

Though I could overlook that completely if the game itself was an all-encompassing simulation. But you can’t even challenge! The women also hit the ball just as hard as the men do. And if it is hit, the net will waver as if it were made of water. Such a strange effect is really not necessary to point out a net roller, for example.

Worse still: The opponents controlled by the game are so easily defeated, even on the highest level of difficulty, that after just a few minutes I no longer knew what I was supposed to do with the career at all – a career, by the way, in which you can’t decide how many games a set and how many winning sets a match should last. It is also unclear to me why the opponents often line up much further behind the baseline on my second serve than on the first and why so many slices look like straight shots.

push target

But the real crux is the principle of the simulation itself, because Matchpoint uses a system similar to AO Tennis 2 or Tennis Elbow 4, i.e. the central challenge in the game is the exact placement of the target marker in the opposing field. So once you’ve decided on a type of punch, move a small shadow to the desired corner while holding down the punch button for the hardest possible punch. The timing of hitting doesn’t matter.

Not even moving to the ball is important, since the pros run to the supposedly correct position almost by themselves. And I write “supposedly” because sometimes I’d like to push my alter ego closer to the net in order to beat a winner faster, which isn’t possible, however, since it’s alarmingly often that you don’t have any control over the movement. And so you just stare at the opposing field for long stretches to draw a small shadow from left to right there bored. This is tennis à la Matchpoint.

So much untapped potential!

It’s not even the game itself that annoys me. I find it rather regrettable that the basis works well apart from the unfortunate cursor staring. After all, there are rallies that capture the dynamics of real rallies in a reasonably credible way. And although the type of shot you choose doesn’t matter too much, you still have to play the balls in the right corners in order to create chances and then take them. Those who stand faster can reach out or aim longer, stops are important variations and well-placed lobs can prevent a loss of points. If you constantly play the same shots in the same corners, the opponents will also adapt and counter, so that you are forced to change tactics at least every now and then. It all works so far.

At the latest when I see my opponent return a lob with a tweener, I wonder if Torus Games simply ran out of time to put a complete game on a solid foundation. In essence, everything that a tennis simulation needs is there – because endurance and movement are irrelevant, the rallies are all so similar that the same situations arise all the time. If you throw a longline from the baseline, for example, you will almost always get a cross back that you will definitely not reach. If you hit the first ball yourself in the opposite corner instead, you are almost certain of the subsequent point.

If not only endurance and manual movement were involved in such situations, but also ideally a more varied AI, the target shooting, which basically works, could not be that far removed from good tennis in my opinion. Imprecise positioning would then affect the accuracy of the currently very accurate aiming. But Matchpoint just doesn’t have such variables.

The same applies to your career, in which you have the choice every week which tournament or show match you take part in and which training sessions you do. You can change clubs, clothes, and even trainers to increase certain skills faster than the previous one. But even that doesn’t seem mature if you simply increase all values ​​after each training session, some more, some less, which doesn’t matter anyway due to the ridiculous level of difficulty. Last but not least, the opponents have different strengths and weaknesses, some of which sound extremely interesting. If one shows weaknesses with breakballs, the other becomes stronger and stronger through successful serves. But even at this point you hardly recognize the differences and, thanks to the lack of a challenge, you don’t have to adjust to them.

And while at least online the world could be halfway okay if, in addition to fast laps against friends and strangers, ranking matches in particular would motivate in the long term, they don’t do that because lag makes positioning the target marker and the flight of the ball a blatant jerky game. Maybe the developers can figure it out. All in all, for the moment, the only thing that remains is to wait for a successful imitator of Top Spin or Virtua Tennis to appear at some point.

Test result for Matchpoint – Championship Tennis

After all: In one respect, Matchpoint even awakens quite strong memories of this top spin – albeit of the earlier part three, which was also an unfinished game with a core that was only theoretically promising. Only part four then exhausted the potential of the then new system and has thus become the last ace in the history of virtual sports to this day.

However, this current entry is far from such success, because it not only lacks a presentation that captures the real flair. Above all, it lacks playful finesse that a credible simulation cannot do without. This includes controlling your character’s movements and having a greater impact on the subsequent shot. You also have to be able to trigger challenges, the network code should run without noticeable stuttering and commentators are not allowed to talk complete nonsense.

So “match point”? Well, maybe “first set serve” would have been more accurate. There isn’t much more to it than that.