Outlaw Tennis review

Tennis is a sport that lends itself well the medium of videogames, after all, the whole shooting match owes a great debt to one of it's earliest appearances - Pong. It's strange then that so few developers have adequately represented the sport. Virtua Tennis and Top Spin excepted, it's never quite been the success one might imagine.

So does Outlaw Tennis join the small collection of tennis games worthy of note? Well no, though it does offer some interesting and diverting mini-games along the way. We reviewed Outlaw Golf 2 earlier in the year and found despite the puerile humour there was a pretty good gameplay mechanic hiding underneath. While the premise for Outlaw Tennis is the same it falls much flatter on its face.

Centre Court

For the uninitiated, the Outlaw series traditionally takes a sport and adds in comedy characters, gameplay modes and colour commentary. Outlaw Golf 2 did actually make me laugh a few times, but the salvation of the game wasn't in the humour, it was that it actually played pretty well.

Here in Outlaw Tennis the humour is several orders of magnitude worse, the characters more annoying and the gameplay, while founded on some solid controls, doesn't quite work. But we'll come to that in a moment, first we'll take a look at the game modes featured.

World Tour

In the tour mode you'll face off against each character in 80 or so events. Some of the events are just standard tennis matches, but there are many more game modes thrown into the mix for variety.

For example there's a game based on US football. Each serve is like a down in the sport, and when you lose a point on your serve it's a turnover. Succesfully scoring points on your serve moves the ball down the pitch - as shown on an onscreen indicator.

Other variations include baseball, ping pong and pinball. The latter even features bumpers on the court that the server aims to hit to score points. All manner of challenges appear in games such as bombs on the court, time limits, changes in weather and even a transparent shot blocker which moves in front of the net.

Funny How?

The real clincher on whether Outlaw Tennis floats your boat or not is how you see the game's humour. Yes you can switch off the commentary and comedy scenes, but they are integral to the game and in essence provide its character. Without the humorous nature of the game it is really just an average tennis game.

Yet with the humour in full force it becomes a much worse game. I actually found it embarrassing to play around my girlfriend, so bad is the humour in the game. It's like watching a comedian die in front of an expectant audience. Okay, if you're 13 and think that breasts are the height of comedy, Outlaw Tennis may raise the occasional titter. But the characters are just awful stereotypes and the humour bawdy rubbish of the most simple kind.

With some good writing talent and much better voice acting, there's a place for such antics in videogames. But with jokes this poor it just makes you feel embarrassed to have the game in the console.

Top Spin

The day could be saved if the on-court action matched up. Sadly it doesn't. The design is fine, there's a power-meter for charging up serves, and differing shots such as slice and top spin have their own buttons. The triggers are used to add a turbo power boos to shots and more spin.

For me though, despite the promising control configuration the game just doesn't work. I found the gameplay underhand and difficult no matter the actual difficulty setting. All too often I was stifled by a character that just doesn't seem to cross the court as quick as my AI opponent leaving me open to shots that I felt I should have reached. It's galling to play a game where you feel your physical controller reactions are quick enough but the game doesn't respond well enough.

As I continued to play the game I found myself increasingly frustrated by missed shots that should have been easily returned - instead my character would dive when another step or two would have meant for a clean cross-court hit.

Set Point

The graphics are a mixed-bag. The various courts - including one in the depths of Hell look pretty good. There's plenty of animation and detail in the backgrounds and they provide and interesting variety. The player models aren't as good, while the textures themselves are pretty detailed the actual 3D models do not look particularly good and the animation is nothing to write home, or to Boomtown, about.

The character designs themselves are just poor generic figures and often stereotypical. The voice acting is weak, the voices just don't seem to represent the figures on screen, nor do they contain the emotion warranted in the admittedly poor dialogue.

Joking Aside

Whether you juvenile humour is a moot point, it's not that the humour is childish that makes it bad, it's just that it's very poor juvenile humour. The saving grace for the game would be if the gameplay mechanics worked fairly well as they did in Outlaw Golf 2.

Unfortunately the game doesn't quite work as well as it should, despite a well thought out control scheme. If you are in the market for a good tennis game on Xbox then you should look no further than Top Spin. If you're hankering after some humour in a game, then look anywhere but here.

The most telling point about the game is that it quite often made me want to throw the controller-S out of the window with anger due to missing shots I reacted well to.