Virtua Tennis 2009 Review

It's a shame the AI is so useless

Adding a dash of variety to the World Tour is middle-class darling and ex-British number one Tim Henman, who pops up as your personal trainer, setting you loads of challenges that can be completed to help improve your player's abilities. Stuff like hit three backhand winners, or three drop shots, that sort of thing.

Still, Tiger Tim can't help save the World Tour from being a monotonous, dreary affair when played against the AI. Experienced VT players won't encounter anything remotely like a challenge until they break into the top ten. To get to that point, though, it's sports game grinding at its most mind-numbing. Play a tournament, win every game to love, raise a couple of places in the rankings, rinse and repeat. Snore. The computer really is so easy you’d have to be a comatose, armless baboon not to win.

The World Tour improves by a factor of about a billion when it's played online. Via the Online HQ, you're able to take your created character and enter fictional tournaments or play one off ranked matches. Win and you'll get points that feed into your overall singles and doubles rankings. Slight lag mean it's not as good as local play, but this is Virtua Tennis 2009 at its very best.

Some will bemoan the fact that online ranked games can only be played with your created character, and it’s an understandable position. Players who put the time into the boring offline World Tour will theoretically have higher level characters, ruining the level playing field being able to play with pros would have created. But this is hardly new to online games. CoD 4 doesn’t suffer newbies gladly. Neither does Killzone 2. The problem here isn’t with forcing created characters into online ranked matches, but the way you need to level up through the dull World Tour.

As a multiplayer game VT2009 is still great

The official blurb says the Virtua Tennis match engine has seen “extensive” updates, but to be honest the game doesn't look much better than it did in 2007. In the normal in-game view it looks great, with lovely, fluid player animations (the way players slide from side to side is brilliant, as is the way they chop back hard to reach shots then spin back to face the net). It’s all complimented by some neat effects, including on court cloud shadows. Up close, however, the game often looks ugly. Player clothing suffers from that horrible waxwork plague that afflicts so many sports games, and the lighting appears garish. There's a good deal of clipping, too. My created character's racket would mysteriously float next to his hand, as if by magic, when held aloft in triumphant victory. And while the licensed player faces look great (Murray especially is unnervingly lifelike), they lack anything approaching human emotion, with expressions you’d expect from a face pumped full of silicon. It's not as if sports games can't do better. You just have to look at the standard bearer for sports game graphics, FIFA 09, to see what can be done.

Despite the fact that all the evidence suggests Virtua Tennis is a series stuck in a rut, Virtua Tennis 2009 is still great fun, especially in multiplayer. The original 1999 Virtua Tennis engine is so good that it provides, even a decade later, one of the most compelling multiplayer experiences not just in sports games, but in all games. It feels like a cop-out to let the game off for this, but it's unavoidable. Watching this series evolve is like watching the white-painted lines on Centre Court dry, but it's still impossible to put down. Virtua Tennis 2009 is the best in the series by virtue of iteration, but justifying forking out £45 for what feels like little more than a roster update is getting pretty hard, especially with Top Spin challenging for that coveted world number one tennis game ranking. Right now VT is holding it off. But for how long?