The “Break it Down” Blog

Summary [7.5 out of 10]

Top Spin 3 offers a deep tennis experience for players willing to learn the more complex control mechanisms while casual players can mostly still enjoy a quick game of tennis. A limited soundtrack, average graphics/environments and a limited licensed roster keep this title from shining as brightly as it could.

Outline

• Introduction
• Player Creation & Progression
  
• Gameplay & Controls
• Graphics
• Sounds & Music
• Online Multiplayer
• Conclusion
• Areas of Improvement
• Screenshot Gallery
• Gameplay Videos

Note

All the video presented in this review are available on YouTube in High Quality. You can click any of the movies directly to open them up on YouTube’s site, then click the “watch in high quality” link under the movie to see the high quality version:

Unfortunately YouTube doesn’t support embedding high quality video yet, so all the video directly embedded in this review is the standard YouTube quality.

Introduction

Top Spin 3 is more of a tennis simulator than it is a tennis game which brings up thoughts of arcade-simplicity and easier gameplay (that is more inline with SEGA’s Virtua Tennis series).

When I first read the marketing material for Top Spin 3 I thought it might be too technical to enjoy, but honestly, it’s really pretty close to existing tennis games out there with a tad more detail oriented design, forcing you to work a hair harder to score points or fend off a more experienced player online.

Out of the gates Top Spin 3 offers all the modes and features you’ve come to expect from most sports games and you don’t have to go without any required features here. For quick-play you have Exhibition matches, Career mode for player creation and progression, a school to teach you how to play and keep you sharp and online play modes to keep you playing after you finish your career.

We didn’t have any complaints with any of these modes and found plenty to keep us busy in each. The robust school mode was impressive and offered classes for just anything you’d want to learn; a very nice touch for a game as deep as Top Spin 3.

Player Creation & Progression

Player creation and customization in Top Spin 3 is surprisingly detailed. There were some hair styles and face styles I was missing, but the sheer fact that you could even set those types of things in the first place was a welcome feature.

The player creation offers total control over the physical features of your player (Height, Weight, Muscle, Neck, Hip Width, etc.) as well as more fine-tuned control like Grunt Type, Grunt Frequency (how vocal your player is), attitude of your player (you can create a John McEnroe-esque player if you like), serve type, forehand type, handedness and even down to the type and location of tattoos.

Overall more features than I found I could ever want with regards to player creation. I would say that the lag time of cycling between the hundreds of combinations (as the new choice loaded, took between 1-3 seconds) made it a real chore to try out all the different choices. It would be nice if this stuff could be cached somehow, so you could cycle quickly across 1 of the 14 neck types and see which one you liked the best without waiting 2 secs between neck types for the revised model to reload.

You can also setup the player’s name, hometown and other personalized information once you are done.

To give you an idea of this in action, the following video we use the player creation system to create a female player, that is 6′4″ tall, horrendously overweight with the muscle mass of a linebacker and no neck with braid-spiked hair… overall I was laughing pretty hard making her, but it gives you an idea of the type of controls you have:

Player progression works straight forward as well. As you play and win matches you receive XP points you can spend on leveling up certain aspects of your player (Forehand, Backhand, Power, Stamina, Serve, etc.)

As you get higher level for each stat, it costs more XP points to keep leveling up that particular skill. I would say overall that leveling the stats is felt in your subsequent matches. That isn’t always the case as you level players in sports games, but we definitely noticed it.

For example leveling our backhand and forehand up, and then we noticed that a lot more of our long-held shots were finishing shots and not just looping rally shots.

Gameplay & Controls

Top Spin 3 focuses gameplay intensely on the timing of your hit by using a Press-and-Release hitting mechanic.

Much like Virtua Tennis, the longer you hold the correct hit button the more powerful and accurate your shot will be, but in Top Spin 3, you are in charge of releasing the button at exactly the right time to fire off the shot; the game won’t do it for you when the ball is in range.

This took a lot of getting used to on my part, there were a lot of times balls went blowing by me because I was holding the button down firmly and forgot to release it. Instead of the game relying on you having some intrinsic knowledge of tennis and ball pacing, the game mechanic is structured around making the most optimal shot when you release the button at the moment the ball bounces for the first time. This simplifies the gameplay for non-tennis-players, but was actually a hindrance to me and another friend who both play tennis because we were trying to actually read the timing on the ball but the game didn’t respond as we anticipated it might.

Adjusting our learning to just release as soon as the ball bounced was easy enough though.

Fortunately the “Top Spin School” included in the game provides 50 or more interactive lessons intended to teach you exactly how to use each skill, button or feature of the game to play tennis. You can run through the school or specific classes anytime you want and there are classes for everything from basics (moving around the court) to using risk-shots or risk-serves even to try and get that ace in. Here’s a complete rundown of the contents of the Top Spin School:

Running around and getting placement was straight forward enough and similar to any other sports game. The other change that Top Spin 3 made that increases the depth of gameplay but also the complexity, is that almost every L or R button on the controller modifies your shot or performs something that can effect your gameplay (e.g. risk shots, running, etc.)

Trying to keep all that functionality in your head while you are running back and forth across a court is unlikely except for the more serious players, fortunately the developers didn’t seem to make it a requirement to beat the Single Player game, you can just dial back the difficulty and the computer player won’t use some of the harder shots on you.

Online, it’s a different story. It seems like everyone likes to bust out the risk shots and go for the big hits… so you better either be fast as sin, or get ready to start trying those other buttons out yourself.

Here’s an entire match played against the computer to give you an idea what gameplay is like:

Graphics

Graphics in this game are a mixed bag. The main characters look pretty good and have some really nice touches to them like real-time sweat on their skin and making their clothes wet, but they aren’t revolutionary and games like Fight Night: Round 3 still hold the trophy for best looking characters.

There are a lot of mo-capped animations and most are mixed together well while others are a hair choppy when transitioning.

I can’t pull a direct winner out between Virtua Tennis and Top Spin 3… both still have some of the robot-y response problems with the animations when changing between them and both have little touches to the animations at times that make them seem more real (like behind-the-back shots). Overall I’d have to say Top Spin 3 brings a larger variety of blended animations together to make a more realistic player on the court though.

Unfortunately the same cannot be said for the crowds or environments. While detailed enough to not really be noticed, they are pretty average… and as soon as you do notice them (some courts have a camera behavior that focuses on the crowds between points) you’ll notice how bad they look.

Muddy textures, duplicated animations and box-like figures make you sign off on the crowd about as fast as you see them.

Courts themselves look fairly nice, but jaggies around the courts and on the nets combined with the mostly static presentation of the court does nothing to dazzle you with realism, just give you the court presentation well enough that you don’t notice it’s so-so.

Some other reviewers have said that dynamic weather was a nice touch, I’ve never personally seen this in the game yet… it’s always been sunny, and I don’t see any ball or shoe marks on the court or anything else that would add to it’s realism.

The environments serves more as a semi-convincing platform to deliver the tennis game on, rather than a graphical marvel that lifts the game to the next level.

Sound & Music

Most of the sound in the game is between Good and Excellent while about 15% of it is either So-So or Bad… and not Bad in the sense that it was sampled poorly, but Bad in the sense that it isn’t the sound you wanted to hear.

For example, hitting tennis balls had a poppy/synthetic hallow sound to them, when it’s really more of a “thwonk” or faster “ttthhhPPPTT” sound when you have a lot of top spin on the ball. Also on TV, the echo introduces a much more solid sound that is really pleasing as well, but what you hear in the game is not really like any of those. Here’s an example:

There are a few sounds that clearly sound recorded in a studio and artificially enhanced in some way or another, then there are other sounds that sound just about as you would expect. The game is overall a surprisingly quite game with no music playing during matches and only a few grunts or hits lighting up the audio track.

I did notice that after adjusting the Camera Mode to place the camera more closely to my player, I was suddenly hearing whispering-people audio samples out of my rear channels during gameplay, this was a really nice touch to make you feel more “in the court”:

Between matches however (at the menus) you are treated to some trendy hits that are completely out of place. As an example, here’s The Great Escape sitting at the match menu:

The menu-music consists of music hits from the last few years, all pretty recognizable stuff… the only problem is that about half of it seems completely out of place. For example, you are getting amped up to play some tennis and beat someone’s face in and The Girls comes on… it’s a good song, you like it and everything… it just seems like a weird song to be hearing there. Here’s another example of The Girls which I found to be completely out of place here in a tennis game:

Online Multiplayer

To start multiplayer you choose the player you want to play as then you can choose to join a Single’s Match or Doubles Match and then search for players to join whichever one you want to play.

The matching seemed pretty straight forward with options for a Quick Match, Custom Match or Create Custom Match.

First trying Join Custom Match lead us to specify the different match-search criteria we wanted:

but for some reason leaving everything on Any still left us with “No Games Found”. We backed up to the Quick Match menu item and tried that and got matched up fairly quickly with another player.

After confirming that you are ready, on the subsequent load screen you are shown the stat-breakdown and comparison between your player and the connected player to get a rough idea if you are about to get your ass handed to you or not:

The matching and game start began pretty quickly, just the standard level-load times, nothing too bad or time consuming.

After the game started however, I waited a bit for the player I was matched against to server, it seemed he actually disconnected from the game which resulted in a failed serve and a somewhat confusing match-summary screen with an option to Rematch or Quit with the user:

We weren’t ever explicitly told that the player disconnected until the Rematch failed. After getting back to the lobby and firing Quick Match off again to get matched up with another player, we saw the game actually paired us back up with the same player again, who immediately left the matching screen and it actually happened 1 more time before we were paired with another player.

Our assessment of this was that either the matching code is crumby or that almost no one was online playing Top Spin 3 on PSN… we assume it’s the later (nitch games tend to suffer from this).

After we got paired with the new player we went at it and battled it out. The experience was, for the most part, identical to the Single Player portion of the game, very fluid and fun, except for lag we were experiencing (you can see it in the movie below if you watch for the “Freezes” that seem like it’s the movie hickupping, it’s actually lag from the online play):

If it hadn’t been for the lag, the online experience was about exactly what I would have hoped it would be. Detailed match-making rules and a fluid experience getting into a game with someone. The downsides are the lack of players (not the game’s fault) and the lag, but that could have been caused by any number of things.

We played a few other matches that were fluid and had no lag issues to speak of. There is no indicator of the quality of connection required to experience a good game with no lag, so for now we are assuming that first match-up with was with someone from Russia… or maybe just on a slow connection.

Conclusion [7.5 out of 10]

Top Spin 3 is a good game for sure, it’s not a great game though. For folks that aren’t fans of tennis, the more complex controls will likely be annoying and stop you from enjoying it. For folks that are fans of tennis but don’t want to take the time to learn all the different combinations of shots and modifier buttons, you might be better served by a simpler/arcade approach to tennis in the form of Virtua Tennis, which still brings a deep tennis game to the court.

Average graphics, environments, effects, sounds and professional roster kept this game from really being an epic tennis game and puts it squarely in the box marked “good tennis games”.

Areas of Improvement

As with our other reviews, we don’t like to criticize if we cannot make suggestions on what should be better, so here goes:

• Better environment and background graphics - The few times you see scenes load or watch the crowd after the end of a match, it looks terrible. The characters are blocky, ridiculous looking and animated poorly… I can’t figure out why the camera spends any time focused on them. Also the textures and details in the environment are basic and just enough for you to not notice they aren’t great.
• More optimized save sequences… you are constantly watching this screen after every menu or even that occurs:
• More professional players on the roster that are recognizable.
• Offer an easier “arcade-y” hit mechanic that fires the button release automatically for you without you actually needing to release the button. Sometimes the combination of Placement (joystick) and Timing (button) and targeting (Joystick) is enough… I don’t also want to worry about release-timing as well.
• Some visual or audible indicator for the perfect timing when to release the hit button. As a tennis player (and I confirmed this with another friend who plays) we found the fact that you always had to release the hit button on the ball’s first bounce really anti-intuitive; we were trying to base our release completely on timing based on where the ball looked to be. While this might have been a design decision to make the game more accessible to non-tennis players, the game is so technical otherwise, that you alienated the group you seemed to be appealing to.
• More appropriate music - the inclusion of trendy music seemed way out of place as opposed to a spots game (specifically the choice of trendy music). I noticed this a lot even though it seems minor.
• More music - This is a weird one, only the menus have music by design, so the games themselves are very quite (might be good for listening for timing, but makes the game feel very sparse), there was also a sound bug that popped up a few times that wiped out music completely from the game and was fixed with a restart.

Screenshot Gallery

Gameplay Videos

View the complete playlist of Top Spin 3 gameplay videos here: Top Spin 3 Gameplay Video Playlist

Update #1: Erik maybe have found an awesome bug that will let you max your player out to hell, check out his hack below if you want to max your player’s stats in Top Spin 3!