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While anyone watching this year’s Wimbledon who saw a women’s match may have been taken aback by the constant grunting, tennis is really about grace and style, with Roger Federer – the dominant force in the men’s game – proving that to be the case. Why Global Star and Hypnotix felt they had to go all ‘extreme on its ass’ I’ll never know, but I do know that as a game, Outlaw Tennis doesn’t really work.
Outlaw Tennis initially provides you with four playable characters (which isn’t many), but more can be unlocked as you play through the Tour mode. These fall into two pretty distinct character sets: women who wear very little clothing and constantly reveal their pants and cleavage, and ridiculous, over-the-top men. These include an ex-stripper, a Sub Zero rip-off (from Mortal Kombat) and a killer (although he seems rather laid back for a killer). It’s almost as if they characters have gone too far, going beyond being funny, and becoming plain stupid.
As you might expect, the environments aren’t the centre courts that you’d see on the tennis tour, with such exotic locations as Hell and an Aircraft carrier being the destinations of choice for these pros. They are in keeping with the ‘Extreme’ nature of the game as a whole, but aren’t as inspired as they could have been.
The main problem with Outlaw Tennis is the fundamental gameplay; it just doesn’t feel right. You can play with slice and top spin, lob your opponent, play drop shots while near the net, etc, but it all feels rather clumsy. Your shots rarely go where you want them to (often being returned straight back to your opponent) and when running, players will often miss the ball for no obvious reason. This is made worse by the computer opponents who will play shots that you simple can’t, causing many shouts of “cheating bast**d” to come from my mouth during play – hardly the appropriate etiquette for a tennis match.
You can also control the spin of the shot by using the left shoulder button, and use a turbo to move faster and hit balls harder by using the right shoulder button, but this doesn’t really improve things. Serving breaks away from the traditional multiple button-press technique and uses a simple, but basic, single press method. You simply hold down one of the serve buttons until you reach the desired power.
To be fair, developer Hypnotix have done all they can to spice tennis up, but did it really need to be spiced up in the first place? They’ve added a load of options to customise your games, ranging from slightly altered rules, to bombs appearing on the court, and there are a plenty of mini-games that are used in the game’s challenge mode – these include such oddities as hitting tiles to reveal bikini clad babes or destroying a robot that fires bullets as well as tennis balls. Multiplayer matches with four players should be fun, as should the online play, but these additions can’t rectify the controls that hamper the overall enjoyment of the game.
The game moves at a good pace, the frame rate remains solid throughout, and the characters have been modelled well, with some extra attention being given to the females and their attributes. The environments are also pretty solid, with plenty of variety and background scenery to liven things up. Animations aren’t so good, with players lacking the smoothness of shot that is seen in games such as Top-Spin and Virtua Tennis.
The audio is pretty terrible, but is probably what fans of the series will be expecting. The commentator’s voice becomes annoying very quickly and what he says is rarely amusing, let alone funny. The players each have their own voice and set of hilarious one-liners that will see you repeatedly hammering the skip-button at the end of each point. There is custom soundtrack support, so you can save your eardrums from the torture if you want to.
The Outlaw series of sports games may have come to and end now that EA has acquired Hypnotix (unless the series continues under a new developer) and after playing Outlaw tennis it seems that the time is right to end it. Previous games in the series, including Outlaw Golf (1 and 2) and Outlaw Volleyball proved to be entertaining diversions, but Outlaw Tennis fails to be anything more than a slightly childish, rather clumsy tennis game.
