Matchpoint – Tennis Championships (Xbox Series X)
The level of control you have over your virtual athlete in a sports video game is variable but incredibly important to the game’s feel. You can’t reasonably be expected to control every member of a football team, but at the same time having too much control over a batter in baseball not only might invalidate the difficulty but doesn’t really match the reality of the sport. Matchpoint – Tennis Championships wants to be a grounded tennis game, and with the sport sometimes moving at incredible speeds, it’s important to give the player the ability to respond quickly but also aim their shot rather than merely return it.
The way Matchpoint – Tennis Championships attempts to include this is by sharing some of the control over movement with the player rather than absolutely surrendering it or guiding it on its own. When a ball is coming towards you in a tennis match, you’ll need to properly move the control stick to get your athlete moving to the right position but you don’t need to perfectly line yourself up. The game will handle the specifics of the action while your control stick switches to instead aiming the destination of your return volley, a black mark appearing on the opposite side of the course that will slide around based on your input. This system takes a bit to get used to of course, learning the feel for how much you need to move the character yourself since they will stand in place or fall short if you do it too little, but getting down the reflexive quick movement towards a ball’s path comes quickly enough and feels mostly natural afterwards. There are a few hiccups in the design though, mostly because the game will refuse to let players hit incoming Outs, this a benefit since it means you get a free point for the opposing player hitting outside the court lines but the game wrests control away from you entirely even before it’s obvious the opponent got an Out. It is a bit disruptive to suddenly not be moving when you want to be but it’s hard to argue with the reward, but this might also lead to a fairly rare instance where your character will just not move for any clear reason and the opponent gets a free point off of it. This odd occurrence never seemed to happen at pivotal moments during my time with the game nor did it happen with such regularity that it was a frequent fear, but it might be an unfortunate byproduct of this movement system and is still worth mentioning for its small impact.
What this movement system does allow is for the tennis action to move at a fairly strong and swift pace. Games in Matchpoint – Tennis Championships are most often competitions to earn three sets comprised of six games each which in turn requires earning at least four points provided there are no tiebreakers. Despite this, matches can remain fairly speedy and involved because the control system allows for the ball to fly fast and for points to be scored often as a result. This speed also means you won’t be able to have an absurd level of control over the ball, the need to quickly determine its path meaning you won’t just get to smash it across the court constantly without considerations for how hard the shot you’re returning is. There are different shot types like lobbing it high or hitting it low and the game’s tutorial actually does a good job acclimating you to the control system on top of explaining why even simple choices like an underhanded swing versus an overhanded one is important, each of the normal swing types mapped to a single button with a drop shot requiring a bit more prep to balance its often disruptive nature. Much of the strategy comes down to trying to move your opponent towards a specific region of the court and then hitting it where they can’t reach it, but even smart preemptive moment before a ball is returned can help you avoid being undone by frequent cross court shot strategies.
The main single player component of Matchpoint – Tennis Championships is a career mode where you use a somewhat limited custom player creator to make either a male or female athlete to compete to be the top rated tennis player in the world. Rather than taking on a tournament structure, the game will instead present a schedule where certain events become available. Most of these will be tournaments, but they range in size and the reward is proportional, the player earning MPT points based on the supposed difficulty of the tournament you’re tackling. Since other players are competing in these tournaments their own rankings can go up, this discouraging the otherwise penalty free option to skip events but usually not too much of a bother since payouts are fairly high and rankings tend to decay rather slowly. A bit of a problem with these tournaments though is the difficulty level. While the game lets you set a broader difficulty level for the entire experience, it can feel like within that space the computer-controlled opponents don’t vary much in competence between the various types of tournaments. However, even though it’s fairly likely you will dominate, it is the kind of success that requires attentive play, the player earning their points and needing to stay canny rather than the game handing you wins with ease. This does make the quest to become top player sometimes feel more like a matter of time rather than personal improvement, but you still feel involved enough in your success that it doesn’t feel hollow, you just won’t find too many difficult volleys along the way.
This difficulty level is a bit of an oddity because players all do have varying stats and your custom character starts off with only around 20 in each stat out of a possible 100. Even when you play against players four times your supposed abilities though it won’t feel much different from going up against weaklings in term of any natural advantages, which does at least mean the focus is more on good tennis play but also makes the training sessions that crop up in the career and equipment rewards rather strange. Not only do new shoes and rackets give you a very tiny supposed bump to your skills but training doesn’t feel necessary to bulk up your stats despite the game concocting some enjoyably simple aiming and responsiveness challenges that do at least literally train the player to be a better player. Some exhibition matches can also crop up in career for short low stakes matches with some rewards like new coaches or equipment but the career doesn’t really provide the sense of truly rising up the ranks despite the fact the baseline tennis remains decent throughout no matter the supposed difficulty level of a foe. One idea that unfortunately comes up short because of this handling of balance is the idea that certain players have weaknesses or strengths you can identify, but the game telling you someone gets tougher when there’s a tie is hard to actually see since it doesn’t meaningfully effect how things unfold. Other times though you can spot it like a player who gets sloppier when they’re down a few points starting to get more faults when they’re serving, but rarely do these seem to add anything to how you approach the match.
Matchpoint – Tennis Championships allows you to play against other players offline or online and you can get more substantial volleys that really test your skill going against people with similar advantages to you, but unfortunately the game does not offer a doubles mode so it will always be one-on-one matches. This might be because Matchpoint – Tennis Championships has some performance issues on occasion, never ones that impact the actual match but after a point is made it will zoom out and sometimes struggle to load the details for the court or crowd. Players often look rather poor with lighting struggling with many hair types that end up giving them an artificial look, but during the action you won’t notice this much and choosing to zoom in for reaction shots after a point ends up showing this weakness instead. The announcer usually provides decent commentary but can’t identify certain situations so sometimes you’ll get credit for good play when you only got a point by the opponent’s error. A lot of these are nitpicks though and don’t disrupt the play, and with some authentic branding on the various court types as well as 16 tennis pros to pick like Nick Kyrgios and Victoria Azarenka help it lean more into the sport simulation angle. With its limited offerings though it still feels like it could have been a cleaner package to make up for not having extra options like doubles play.
THE VERDICT: Matchpoint – Tennis Championships offers a lean tennis experience but one that controls fairly well and still keeps the player relatively engaged because of it. The specific shared control system for movement allows for matches to be quick but gives the player a reasonable degree of control over their shots despite the need to be speedy and reflexive. The difficulty balancing in career mode does feel lacking though and the training minigames only last so long before they’re mastered, but the core tennis play is decent fun against other human players and always demands a good degree of involvement so even when you’re tearing apart the competition, it’s because you’ve put in that work needed to stay on the ball at all times.
And so, I give Matchpoint – Tennis Championships for Xbox Series X…
An OKAY rating. Not visually appealing enough to earn points for being true to life and not challenging enough to be a captivating tennis experience, Matchpoint – Tennis Championships mostly gets by on still capturing the sport well enough in terms of how it plays rather than how it structures itself. It’s a shame the game is missing some features like doubles play, but it’s also hard to be upset when the game values the player’s skill over arbitrary numbers in regards to player stats and equipment. That does mean it removes a sense of progression though but if the game had made the more difficult tournaments in career mode feature smarter players as well then it could have provided a more compelling and competitive experience. Getting to go up against other players shows there is potential for more thrilling volleys when both sides are bringing their A game but the solo experience still hits on the base line thrill of the sport. You do need to cross up and psyche out your opponent to actually earn those points, you do need to be moving properly to respond in time and quickly line up your shot as you desire, and even with the assistance the game gives you in movement the only time it feels it truly taking something away by doing so is when it does the weird approach to granting you points for the opponent getting an Out. The game does need more polish, the visuals coming up short at times and those weird rare moments where you just don’t move oddly sloppy in a game that doesn’t seem like it had too much on its plate design-wise, but for a tennis game in a pinch it does its job despite there being better options out there.
Matchpoint – Tennis Championships took a risk taking so much of the player’s movement control into its own hands for a sport where movement is such a key part of play, but this isn’t Wii Sports tennis where that causes frequent actual disruptions. Whether you make it to the ball is still at first in your hands and then the game identifies your intent and handles the rest of the running so you can start focusing on where you want to hit it back, the focus still on court positioning and where you’re targeting so that the game can still provide some decent entertainment despite its struggle to vary up its difficulty. Despite its name focusing on being the top player, Matchpoint – Tennis Championships is better thought of as providing the casual thrills of the sport, the game able to keep its speed but not really focusing much on providing tough competition.