More realistic tennis titles have always had to take a back seat to their arcade counterparts. However, with a newer generation of consoles that could produce even more realistic graphics, the more realistic tennis games are doing a better job of duplicating the professional circuit.
2K Sports has noted this in bringing the Top Spin franchise to the new generation of consoles with Top Spin 3, focusing on making the game look and feel real to the touch. Having not played the previous Top Spin titles, I found Top Spin 3 to be enjoyable, but still lacking in several areas.
Top Spin 3 and its competition in Sega's Virtual Tennis series are both created with one thing in mind: to create as realistic a professional tennis experience as possible. It would probably be good, then, to include more than a handful of tennis pros on both the male and female sides. The big names are sure there, like Roger Federer, Andy Roddick, and Maria Sharapova, but outside of roughly ten male and ten female players, the other pros look like they came right out of create-a-player mode. That's probably because they did. The lack of actual tennis stars is a little disturbing and makes the game feel a little less realistic. I'm not sure if this is the result of not having enough money to cover each tennis pro's licensing rights or if some just decided to withhold their likenesses from the game, but when you're playing against a bunch of no-names in the quarterfinals of the U.S. Open, things seem a little fake.
Top Spin 3 really doesn't have a whole lot of surprises. Along with your basic exhibition mode, an options menu that's pretty basic, and a tournament mode are career and create-a-player modes. These are the two areas you'll probably be most focused on, as they do go hand-in-hand. The create-a-player mode offers a fair amount of customization, including the ability to alter clothing style, face and body shape, hair, and tattoos. While you can get kind of creative with this mode, the number of different styles you have to pick from is rather small, leaving create-a-player mode a little shallow.
Career mode, though, is much more fleshed out and offers a real challenge to gamers. Choosing one of your custom players, you begin their rise from the amateur ranks to becoming a full-fledged pro. Along the way, you earn experience points and points that can be used in the shop to purchase new items. While career mode starts off easy, once you get to pro level, things change quickly. Depending on how you level up your player, and depending on your style, certain types of players will present problems at all levels. For example, I ran into issues with people who were able to charge the net and drop short shots until I got better with my long shots. Once you reach world number one status, though, the even tougher legend mode opens up, challenging you to win all four major titles and beat Hall of Famers on courts of their choosing. There's not a whole lot of replay value when you beat the entire career mode, but it's long enough to keep you busy for quite a while.
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