Report Review

There are a number of real life athletes that are presented as playable characters in Smash Court but you are also given the option of creating your own character through an in game character creation tool. It may prove challenging to use the creation tool to make your ideal attractive athlete, but at least it gives an opportunity for couch potatoes such as yourself to bring out an active and athletic alter ego in the virtual world. You are able to customize your eyes and mouth into extreme proportions, and you even have access to strange apparel. After creating the most awesome looking athlete you could think of, you then play a match. That’s when the fun meter starts to decline. Whatever button commands you pushed, it’s not perfectly mirrored on screen.

Lobs and drops shots are just futile. Drop shots are incredibly slow. So slow that opponents could afford to take a quick nap, wake up and still be able to rush and receive it. Lobs are even worse as they mockingly float in the air giving your opponents the opportunity to return a smash. In the end, it comes down to button mashing and making sure to hit the ball and pray your opponent misses it. And often times they do. The game animation is just as lousy as the controls as they oftentimes don’t respond appropriately to the buttons you’ve pressed. There are times when your player won’t budge as your opponent returns the ball; all the while you are mashing the control button to oblivion out of desperation for your player to make a swing. It’s tolerable to see your player make a swing and miss. At least you can tell there’s effort but desperately positioning yourself to return a perfect shot and see your player not responding at such a crucial moment is just plain torture, at the least, frustrating.

Despite the crappy control and anomalous animation response, you still have big chances of winning a match. The AI players aren’t very sophisticated. They are in fact quite simple minded as they are mostly content in keeping themselves on the baseline and don’t really have the capability to come up with ulterior motives in getting a ball past you. There are surprising moments, however, when your AI opponents, right after serving, will rush to the net. You have close to zero chances of returning the ball past them because of the sloppy controls and sometimes delayed response. If you are hoping of tossing a lob, that hope will swiftly be shot down by a returning smash from your AI opponent. But alas, all hope is not lost as they aren’t very good in remembering their winning techniques, making them inconsistent in the strategies they employ. You definitely have a chance at winning.

All things considered, Smash Court Tennis 3 is just too flawed for players to achieve total satisfaction in the game. At the most, it just provide a mediocre gaming experience and at the worst, a hair-pulling frustrating one.