Top Spin 3 Review
Being a fan of the
Top Spin series, I was chomping at the bit to try the new one,
Top Spin 3. After my experience with the game I found I was highly disappointed by this outing. The game certainly looks good, but looks are only skin deep. The best parts of the graphics are the characters themselves (now with increasing sweat textures!) and the actual changing of the weather as a cloud passes over or the sun comes out that you experience on the court in real time. I don’t remember that being in the last game, but maybe I’m just forgetting it. The first sign of problems with the game was when you go into a match and the game is loading who knows what (characters, sweat details, highly textured balls? Who knows!). During these moving long shots of the venue you see basically a slideshow as the animations and camera movement stop and then move again. Not once during my whole play time did I see a clean opening to a match before the players are introduced. Once whatever it is actually gets loaded the game runs with no slowdown at all.
As you finish off points, games, sets and matches you see basically the same cutscenes you’ve seen in the previous
Top Spin games where the players strut their stuff and react to what has happened.
That’s all well and good, but the animations get old after a while and there should be an option to just basically skip them without having to pound on the A button in order to get to the next point. Same thing goes after you win or lose a match, you can press the A button to get through the first section, but then you have to watch the handshake at the net and your player reacting to whether they won or lost. Why can’t I skip this? Why haven’t they learned to fix this now that we’re at the third game in the series?
The new control scheme takes a while to get used to. Instead of just holding or pressing on a shot button you actually now have to hold it and let go of the button at the right time in order to get a swing off. This basic change to the dynamic of the previous games took me about 30 minutes to get used to. I’m still not a fan of this change because aiming becomes more difficult when trying to also remember to press and release the button at the right time. In the previous games I could aim to my heart’s content, this time around most of winners I executed were via a forehand to the deep side of the court that I was located in. There were some times where I could get a backhand winner, but those were few and far between and almost made me regret spending so much experience points on increasing my backhand proficiency. Dare I say this new dynamic actually made matches longer than they should have been for me because of my directional problems? Also of note is that there are now shots tied to the right analog stick that you learn about in the tutorial, which you should run through because knowing the differences in this game is mandatory pretty much. Once I learned about the right stick moves in the tutorial I made the decision to never use them again. The movements had to be quite precise and why worry about screwing up a shot when I’m already having problems getting the ball to go where I want it to?
They have also changed up what used to be the star system in the previous games.
Back then, you’d go through training and receive different color stars, but here there is no training and instead you gain experience points (XP) as well as points you can spend on apparel and equipment as you go through the different levels of competition. With the XPs you can spend them on different categories such as forehand, backhand, serve, return, speed, power, stamina, etc. Right off the bat you need to know what you want your created character to be strong in and spend all your points there while also bringing up the less important ones to some extent. Once you have a plan of action you should be fine, just don’t pick more than four sections to excel in by my guess or you’re going to be a jack of all trades and master of none.
The apparel is something I want to talk about as well. As I was creating my player for the Career mode I found that a major part of my created tennis stars from the previous games were missing: sunglasses. I kept looking for sunglasses and never found them during the creation of my player or in the apparel shops I could go to. Why the heck are there not sunglasses in the game? My digital representation in this game has to be stylin’ some shades! Also of note is that having a hat, bandana, etc. is actually part of the haircut grouping while creating your player. I didn’t know that when I built my initial player or he would have been wearing a hat too. Poor choices made in these two categories, although they may be more personal to me than to you.
Finally the Career mode is an utter disappointment.
I went through the Challenge and Amateur sections pretty easily and then came the Junior section. This is where I was shown the calendar, representing months in the calendar year. I went through the 12 months and chose the harder tournament over the easier one and won all 12. There was a point at about month 8 where I thought I had enough points built up to win the Junior section, maybe I should rest and see what the Professional section has. Then I thought I better go through the other tournaments because I’d need XP to delve out to my sections for the more difficult challenges ahead. When I finally got through the Junior section and into the Pro section I was presented with…the same calendar type?! 12 months with tournaments to choose from, both hard and easy. This is when I decided to turn the game off because I was expecting the Pro side would be more like
Top Spin 2 where you go week to week picking between training, single or double action, but no. Instead you go through even longer tournaments doing the same thing you were before. Bad move in my mind.
Then I hopped online to finish out my play on this game. The online portion worked pretty well from the one game I played. I had no lag at all, although that isn’t an endorsement that this game doesn’t experience lag, I just didn’t in my one game. I did get soundly beat, something that never happened back in the original
Top Spin or
Top Spin 2, so that was rather humbling. Then again I was still having problems with the control scheme and aiming my shots along with running around the court.
It is really difficult for me to tell you to spend $60 and pick this game up. I don’t even remember
Top Spin 2 coming out at this price (I think it was $50) and that is a far better game than this one even though the graphics aren’t as good. I just found
Top Spin 3 to be utterly disappointing from top to bottom and made me long for the days of the previous two games. Why did they make so many changes to a blueprint I thought was pretty good? Maybe the sales were so bad on the last one that they decided to try something new hoping people would pick it up. Well, I’m personally glad I rented it and didn’t blow $60 on this game. You should also rent it, maybe you’ll enjoy it. This game should only be bought by those fans of the series that are prepared for a huge disappointment.
The Good- The graphics, now with increasing sweat textures!
- Real-life tennis players look good for digital reproductions
The Bad- New control scheme takes a while to get used to
- Massive change to the career mode is not appreciated
- Change from star system to point system for abilities
The Ugly- When I got to the Pro level and found it was no different in concept than the Junior level
*Note - review based on Xbox 360 version
