Whether or not you like this game is going to be predicated upon how much time you’re willing to invest to learn the controls. There’s an excellent tutorial mode called “Top Spin School” that will teach you all of the details of proper serving, volleying, and shot-making. If you’re a student of the game, you’ll appreciate the nuances of timing, footwork, positioning, and aim that have been incorporated into the controls.

You must prepare your shot with your feet, body position, and racket before striking it in real tennis, and the same applies in this title. Basically, you have to position your body, hold down the shot button (flat, topspin, slice, and lob are all mapped to the face buttons), aim in the direction you’d like to place the ball, and release the button at the appropriate time to swing. If you’re too close to the ball depth-wise, you need to swing sooner to take the ball early to make good contact. If you’re in front of the ball, it will bounce up and hit you in the body, and you won’t make contact at all. If you’re too far from the ball, you’ll lunge at it and send a return weakly over the net, if you hit it at all. These details manifest themselves in several ways until you learn to read what’s coming at you and plan your shots accordingly. It’s an extremely rewarding system for tennis players and fans alike, and it provides the most realistic action in any tennis game to date. If you just want to pick up the controller and compete, or if you’re a fan of arcade tennis games, you’ll struggle with this scheme.

The right-stick also comes into play, as it can be used for serves, volleys, and lob shots. It actually feels quite natural, and it’s a wonder that the entire scheme wasn’t mapped in some way to just using the sticks with shoulder button modifiers. You can use the triggers to try “risk shots,” but you must be precise in your timing and positioning or else you’ll make an unforced error.

You can play exhibition matches and online matches (singles or doubles), or start a career. A neat addition to the online play is the “world tour” mode, where you compete during a defined time period to be number one. It resets every so often, so you can jump in any time and not worry about having to make up ground.

The career mode is typical in structure, yet pretty deep. You start out as an amateur, and work your way into the Jr. Pro tour and then the Pro tour, with your goal of becoming a tennis legend. Your stats and ranking are tracked, and it’s very rewarding to perform well and climb the ladder of the professional ranks. As you progress, you earn prize money, points to augment your abilities, and points to spend on new gear. The collection of gear is name-brand and fairly decent, but it actually doesn’t take too long before you can afford just about anything you want. The gear has no impact on game play, either. Clothes shouldn’t make the man, so to speak, but better shoes or a better racket might be worth a point or two in your attributes.