Pickleball Smash (PS5)

The rise of pickleball has been an interesting trend to watch, the popular leisure sport becoming more and more common in the 2020s as an activity that didn’t require much athleticism to engage with but still kept the players active and entertained. While thriving because of its ease of play, like any sport, competitive leagues have emerged around it. For those who know the casual form of pickleball, a video game version might feel like it’s stripping away the physical fun for something without much life, but if it can be played in tournaments, you would think it could be adapted into a video game with some life and energy. Unfortunately, Pickleball Smash isn’t aiming for more serious players or the casual crowd exclusively, and as a result, things get a bit messy.

 

Pickleball Smash does feature the standard ruleset for how pickleball is commonly played. Utilizing small paddles, you hit wiffleballs back and forth across a net, the court fairly similar to the one found in tennis save for one very important region. The kitchen exists near the net, the players not allowed to hit a ball while standing in the kitchen unless the ball has already bounced inside this rectangular region. This is meant to encourage less aggressive play in the same way the weaker equipment does, and this does carry over to a standard match in Pickleball Smash. Usually, when hitting the ball, you’re not going to hit it with much strength, even if you choose to plant your feet and charge your swing. As a result, it’s fairly easy for the opponent to get to the ball in time to return it, an indicator on the ground making it even easier to follow the flight of the ball. Unless you’re playing against the game’s weakest AI opponents or just starting to understand the controls, it’s not very likely a standard hit will earn a point, this being where the leisure sport hits into the reality of video game play. It’s fine enough in real life when your have your own body as a limit and can talk with your opponent, but here the characters don’t have any issue reaching the ball so things could drag on. However, Pickleball Smash does include something that helps resolve volleys, although it feels like a bit of a betrayal of the sport.

There are four standard hit types assigned to the four face buttons on the controller. There’s a standard hit, the so-called power shot that isn’t normally that much stronger, a curved hit that still isn’t hard to predict thanks to the indicator, and the dink. A dink hits the ball low, often into the kitchen, making it hard to return if you’re caught unaware. Unless you’re very far back in your side of the court it still might not make a difference, but each of these shots also comes with a super-powered variety, and this is where things get stranger. Once you’ve built up energy with the very easy process of hitting the ball back and forth, you’ll be able to use that energy for things like a false dink where the ball hits the court and then careens off to the side or a lob or curve shot with more zest. The power shot’s enhancement though makes the ball fly with far greater speed than other hit types, and it’s not that difficult to build up the power for it, line up just right, and hit it in a way where the opponent can’t return the hit. As a result, it’s pretty likely the points you’ll earn in Pickleball Smash will come from these super shots, a lot of the time you spend playing just waiting for the energy to be there so you can swiftly score in a way that can be hard to counter.

 

The AI takes far too long to keen to the super shot approach, only the smartest opponents able to really see what you’re doing, but they do have an unusual ace up their sleeve. The computer controlled athletes can all do super shots whenever they feel like it. Naturally, when playing against lower leveled opponents or in the easier tournaments, they won’t take advantage of this as often, but near the end they can even end up stringing together super shots for multiple hits in a row, something not available to you. It would be easy to get upset over this seemingly unfair advantage, but it seems to be an accommodation to make up for their poor play otherwise. Funnily enough, pickleball uses a scoring system similar to older volleyball rules where only the server can score for a volley, which could have lead to games dragging out for much longer, but the super shots can lead to necessary turnovers often enough that standard matches aren’t likely to drag on that much longer despite the rule. Blessedly, the game’s handful of tournaments all default to a fairly manageable format of being the first to 11 points despite allowing the multiplayer matches to go to much higher limits. The tournaments do throw in a boss character to face after you’ve earned first place, these usually just being special athletes who realize their super shot advantage as they’ll use it more frequently than standard tournament opponents.

The six tournaments are the main mode of play in Pickleball Smash although they aren’t likely to take you long to go through, although there are unlockables in the form of customization gear for your characters. Pickleball Smash lets you create a few athletes with the gear and clothing you unlock, although their names do have to be formed from words provided by the game. This does, however, touch on one element where Pickleball Smash doesn’t do half-bad. Generally, the presentation is simple but colorful and clean, the background music pleasant and there’s even a range of courts like a rooftop, a snowy court, and one that’s beachside. These won’t impact things, but the courts as well as those provided words for your character names all lean into the sport’s unusual association with pickles. You can expect words like “gherkin”, “sour”, or “cucumber”, but also deeper pulls like “giardiniera” are delightfully odd even if it doesn’t translate into much personality beyond the monikers. If Pickleball Smash leaned towards more casual fun, that bit of silliness would feel suitable, but smashing the ball feels more important than the little things in this sports title.

 

Pickleball Smash does offer doubles play, but only in standard single match play rather than any of the tournaments. It also has a set of three minigames so it can boast about technically having more content, but they aren’t really great to return to. One is an endurance challenge to keep the ball in play as it starts moving faster and faster over time, another called Copycat has you learning a gradually expanding set of shot types that probably won’t get hard until you’ve grown tired of the easy memory task, but the last minigame where you need to hit the ball into specific targets to earn points or earn more time at least has some potential since it is more varied and values your own input more than the others that tend to drag on. These won’t add longevity to the experience nor do they make that much special use of the controls save for that target hitting one, leaving Pickleball Smash without much to appeal to casual or serious players since it all boils down to very basic play throughout.

THE VERDICT: Pickleball Smash’s basic controls do their job and let you engage with the relaxed leisure sport it features, but their strength ends up the game’s weakness. Quite often the way to score will be earning energy for your super shots that will often all too easily earn you a point, so most of the time you stall things out waiting until you can do your hit that will be hard to counter by all but the best AI. The tournaments end up a breeze because of this and the minigames aren’t involved enough to help carry the game afterward, Pickleball Smash ending up an odd mix of feeling too casual and simple up until you whip out those power shots that actually make a difference.

 

And so, I give Pickleball Smash for PlayStation 5…

A TERRIBLE rating. Pickleball Smash found itself in a pickle when it tried to adapt the trendy leisure sport. Make it too casual and accessible and people aren’t really going to find much about it entertaining, the game thriving in real life because physical activity can be enjoyable even when it’s not difficult. However, it’s not like you could add a stamina meter or physical limitations to video game pickleball without it ending up frustrating, so there had to be some way to break away from hollow repetitive volleys. Unfortunately, the super shots move things too far in the other direction, these deciding factors centralizing the play too much. Because of this focus on strong and heavy hits, you end up with Pickleball Smash not feeling much like pickleball anymore. What it ends up feeling like is essentially just a worse version of tennis, dull periods added before you can whip out a hit that might matter. A pickleball game adaptation would probably struggle with any attempts at authenticity outside of perhaps a VR adaptation, but Pickleball Smash ends up an ugly mix of boring play and an unexciting way of actually scoring.

 

I’ve sometimes seen pickleball described as a workout rather than a sport, and that is probably the crux of why adapting it into a controller-based video game will rub up against the kind of issues Pickleball Smash has. However, I don’t know if Pickleball Smash deserves the benefit of the doubt when it comes to the issues it encounters. Not much effort or thought was put into iterating on the sport’s basics, the game feeling more like a trendchaser latching onto pickleball’s own popularity. The nice thing about a tennis video game is it removes the physical barriers that would make the sport difficult, so while real pickleball does a good job of condensing tennis and broadening who can play it, Pickleball Smash feels like worse tennis without any of the benefits that come from real life pickleball.