A new tennis game is making its way across the ever-thriving sports games market: Matchpoint – Tennis Championships. The game has been “in development for a few years” at Torus Games, an Australian team with decades of experience, who are trying their hand at this discipline for the first time.
Over the years, Torus has worked on basketball, racing, rugby, baseball games, and much more. But never tennis. Despite that, the developer has set a very high goal: it wants to create a tout-court tennis simulator. A faithful representation of this sport.
Matchpoint – Tennis Championships features 18 licensed athletes, including wonderkid Alcaraz and Kyrgios, but lacking the likes of Nadal and Federer up to Djokovic and the Williams sisters. If the technical ambitions are considerable, the budget is what it is, and this is clear even when you look at the athlete selection screen.
However, the complex mechanics to master are all there, so much so that Torus started its press presentation with a tutorial to highlight the individual shots you can perform on the field and the specific differences between them.
The Career mode is inevitably the deepest: as usual, you create a character from scratch and compete in the main official tournaments around the globe. Initially, you can’t get in some of the most famous ones as you don’t have a sufficient ATP score to access them, and therefore you’ll have to play some of the smaller competitions available, and work your way up to superstardom.
You have to choose whether to participate in a minor tournament (and thus accumulate points in the ranking – lost, as in the real sport, if you don’t take part in other competitions for too long) or train so your tennis player earns experience points to reinvest on their growth. You can choose among six skills to improve, and you can enhance them through coaches who get interested in your player based on their performance on the court. Thankfully, if you’re not feeling a match, you can save your game halfway through and return back to it when you’re refreshed.
The full-fledged Career features 65 tournaments and 29 stadiums, and it’s structured in a way that you don’t play against licensed tennis players alone, but also a number of random athletes created ad hoc by the developers.
Matchpoint – Tennis Championships also includes an online mode which – despite lacking doubles – is divided into ranked, casual, and private, with a friend joining through a code. Ranked playlists require three qualifying matches, while cross-play will be enabled from launch across all platforms.
On the court, Matchpoint feels different from other tennis games, thanks to a system where you learn strengths and weaknesses as you play. By hitting the ball in a certain way or in a certain direction, a message may appear certifying that as a weakness to attack or a strength to try to limit.
This feature is particularly fun: the game may suggest, for example, that the opponent will not withstand the pressure a few games from the end of the match and will collapse psychologically, and that will happen just as suggested, resulting in less reactive movements and weaker resistance to your shots.
This is just an example and one of the most trivial, because most are technical, requiring quite good skills. This really denotes Matchpoint’s sim ambitions, as you’re left to learn the game’s nuances as soon as the tutorial training wheels are off.
Such a mechanic clearly required considerable work on the AI. Each computer-controlled opponent features a “temper” stat, which differs from player to player, and causes the opponent to react realistically at the different stages of their game.
The developer made use of Xsense suits, the new-gen performance capture suits debuted in FIFA 21, to capture its animation data. These suits, which allow developers to detect more nuanced movements, were used under the guidance of several coaches to whom the developer talked in order to make things authentic.
From the trailers, tennis players’ animations appeared a bit twitchy. However, a few hours in the game revealed those animations are way better than they seemed, and look quite smooth – at least during gameplay.
However, transitions feel a bit rough and the tennis players themselves get frozen at times, especially when you hold down a button to load the shot, presumably for the lack of a more life-like animation. Every now and then, you need to move the left analogue stick around just to wake them up and put them in motion again. The ball’s shadow is also a bit much and can be distracting during fast-paced play. Perhaps a less intrusive but equally useful aid wouldn’t be too bad.
Matchpoint – Tennis Championships is out on July 7 for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch. A demo is already available on Steam, and Kalypso says it’s coming to consoles soon, so you all have the opportunity to give the game a proper look yourself if you are interested. It’s also scheduled as a day one Game Pass release for Microsoft platforms.
Written by Paolo Sirio on behalf of GLHF.
