Hot Shots Tennis (PS2)
The game known as Hot Shots Tennis in North America goes by the name Everybody’s Tennis in Europe, and while that name does sound a bit more generic, Everybody’s Tennis does capture the game’s goal of making the sport accessible to anyone who has a handle of the PlayStation 2 controller. Aiming your shots is simple, you don’t need to consider your racket’s position, and other little design choices all go towards making this an easy sports title to pick up and play.
When you’re on the court in Hot Shots Tennis, there’s a system of cues and controls in place that ensure you can greatly influence the movement of your ball and are rewarded when you come to understand its little nuances. The first consideration is when you hit the ball, the game rewarding you with faster and more accurate returns if you time your button press perfectly for when the ball is within reach. If you press it early or late, a rabbit or turtle symbol appears over your character respectively, with a music note or a pink eighth note appearing to indicate when the timing is right or practically perfect. Unless your timing is really off you usually won’t have to worry about your return flying wildly off the intended path, but figuring out the rhythm of play and striking when you’re sure you have things lined up is a simple consideration but one that can allow for skill and your understanding of how the opponent is playing to give you an edge.
The timing of your racket swing isn’t the only important part of your returns though. When you hit the ball, you can use the control stick or directional buttons to influence where on the court it will land. Pulling back will make it bounce closer to the net, holding forward will send it to the back of your opponent’s range, and while middle court doesn’t require any directional influence, you can always determine which half of the court it lands on by holding left or right along with any forward or backward direction you desire. The need to move your character around to return serves can sometimes mean it’s better to just ensure you hit the ball rather than get tricky with how you return it and sometimes running to grab it will inevitably add a little spin from the carried over input, but this adds an easily accessed set of options to play like drawing the opponent toward the net or exploiting their close up play by hitting far into the back. Which button you press to return also influences the swing, with X being your go-to for a standard strength shot while circle will slice it for a more deceptive hook and triangle will send the ball high up into the air. Every unconventional shot has some sort of sacrifice in speed or power and a colorful flash of the controller button will appear above the ball so you can’t confuse an opponent too easily with wild play. No matter how it’s hit though, an indicator that you can turn off or on will show where it will have its first bounce to help with returns, but its presence won’t rob trick plays of their effectiveness since you will often want to move your opponent into an exploitable position before pulling off such deceptive maneuvers.
Funnily enough, serving the ball is possibly the most consistently difficult aspect of the game but not one that undermines it since it is still rather simple. When you serve you need to throw the ball up into the air and hit it with the same exact timing you would to earn a music note if you want it to fly true. Too early or too late though and you’ll earn a fault when the ball goes too far off course, but thankfully the game did put in an easier serving option that sacrifices power for reliability. Still, you’re meant to pick from the bigger risk or the ease of use, and it’s hard to resist the desire to hit hard and in interesting spots with the less forgiving service option. Hitting the net with your ball or getting an out also feels like it’s not all too rare if you end up in an awkward position or mistime your return in some way, so if you want to avoid giving up free points to the opposition you’ll need to get a hang of serving and not hitting outs.
Essentially, all the tools for ball control and special shots are not only easy to understand but easy enough to execute without being completely automatic, the player relying on their ability to respond to shots or outfox their opponent to succeed rather than there being some barrier of entry when it comes to the controls. Hot Shots Tennis also makes sure to have its tennis matches be quite customizable so that you can play casual matches how you like. A typical tennis match involves players earning points by successfully having the ball bounce on the opposing player’s side of the net twice before they can return it, and four points earned this way will earn them a game. Earning a certain amount of games will in turn earn you a set, and once you have the required amount of sets, you win the match. There are other small considerations like tiebreakers and how hitting outside of the court with the first bounce is an out and gives the point to the opposition, but the games and sets determine the length of the match and you can set the amount needed of both to fairly high or low levels. The single-player challenges never get too wild with their game and set count, meaning even at its longest, if there are six games required for a set then it will make only a single set needed for victory and if there are multiple sets required they’ll often only need two or three games to earn.
Different courts will influence how the balls bounce and the player you pick will have a set of stats unique to them that determines aspects like how well they can hit the ball, how fast they are on the court, and how accurate their shots will be to your input. Thankfully, no court is too crazy in how it influences things despite having many nice natural and urban backdrops to keep things varied. You can find yourself playing on a pretty standard school tennis court or at an alpine resort’s special accommodations and also find yourself in a bit odder locations like on a beach or in an old west town, but the game remains honest and gimmick free. The players do definitely hold the greater influence over how things play out though, the younger ones you start off with definitely not as capable as the pros you unlock near the end of the game’s challenge mode. However, that very same challenge mode has you sometimes locked into weaker players as you go up against pros to show that stats don’t always guarantee victory while also serving as a good test of whether you’ve learned to play well or are coasting on the strength of your best unlocked athlete.
Challenge mode is the game’s main mode, there being no tournament options or anything closer to real world standards but the challenges all serve as fun preset match types where you can unlock new things and face off against tough computer controlled opponents. Working your way up from the Beginner Class challenges to more difficult and global challenge sets, you’ll unlock the characters, courts, special costumes, and even umpires by clearing the specially designed matches and these do sometimes feature rather minor twists that can have a tangible impact on the outcome. Besides the ones that deliberately have you outmatched statswise, you’ll also sometimes have to do a match of tennis without any indicators on where a ball will land or disable the helpful option to always view the action from behind your player, making returning from the other side of the court a little more awkward when the camera’s not with you. These simple shake ups mostly try to test if you’ve got a hang for the game rather than changing the rules or adding a disruptive gimmick, but the double matches do feel different as your role and positioning choices change over the course of the two-on-two matches. AI partners are pretty competent too, and supposedly they can be powered up if you give them their alternate costumes, adding something more than just visual flair to that set of unlockables.
The training mode in the game does a good job of introducing all the necessary concepts while also serving as a set of quick and enjoyable minigames. As you get a chain going of hitting to the right part of the court with the right hit type the requirements will become more stringent and the the zone you need to hit becomes tighter, meaning that getting a high score involves mastering the control system. These are a fun and easily understood way to help introduce the basics, but you could just as easily learn them through play since many of them feel natural and can be sussed out through quick experimentation.
THE VERDICT: Hot Shots Tennis is an accessible and fun take on the sport, its world colorful and its controls simple to make it inviting and easy to pick up. Hitting the ball how you want is easy to achieve but deciding how to do so and considering your opponent’s actions and positioning ensure there’s a degree of depth to how you line up your next return. The challenge mode structures its matches well and throws in a few unexpected variables to test your skill. Hot Shots Tennis is focused on honest tennis that is quick to learn but still has some extra layers to it so it’s not overly basic, so while it will mostly appeal to people who already have an interest in tennis, it provides a video game adaptation of the sport that does not require the training and self-discipline that can make the real world game harder to immediately get into and enjoy.
And so, I give Hot Shots Tennis for PlayStation 2…
A GOOD rating. Besides ideas like playing tennis near an ancient Greek ruin or underneath a busy railway bridge, Hot Shots Tennis keeps things down to earth while still having an inviting look to it. This isn’t trying to be a real simulation of the sport, in fact, it’s trying to boil it down to a form where a regular player only needs to hold a direction or press a button to pull off some useful and reliable techniques. More importantly though, accessibility doesn’t come with a complete absence of difficulty, and while the AI opponents can fall for certain tricks a bit often, the challenge format and increasing competency of the opposition means understanding when to swing, how to swing, and where to hit the ball to is key to consistent victory. While the amateur leagues go down with little fuss, later challenges do step up their game to ensure you’ve actually developed some tennis skill, but mastering this game’s take on tennis is made all the easier by having its information out in the open and constantly present in the form of the small but useful indicators.
Everybody’s Tennis is actually not quite as broadly appealing as something like Mario Tennis that ropes people in with its recognizable characters and small changes to the tennis formula, but this tennis game does provide an authentic reproduction of the sport while giving you the means to play like a professional athlete. You’ll have that level of control over your ball that can turn returns into tactical maneuvers where players try to exploit positioning and the opponent’s reactions to earn points. Hot Shots Tennis reproduces the sport well on top of opening the door to casual and nuanced play by making the fundamentals easy to incorporate but their application really where a skillful or tactical player can shine.