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The “Hot Shots” gang moves to tennis. Hot Shots Tennis is exactly what you’d expect: a light-hearted tennis game with zany characters. Although it isn’t the deepest tennis game available, it’s quite fun.
Hot Shots Tennis features three main gameplay modes: challenge mode, fun time tennis, and practice in training mode. Challenge mode is the game’s primary singleplayer mode. Here you can select a male or female avatar and play in a number of singles and doubles matches in order to unlock courts, characters and outfits. The game’s various characters have their own play style and ratings, although the new characters you get are generally better than the ones you already have. Fun Time Tennis is the game’s four-player, offline multiplayer mode. Lastly, Practice in Training mode is the game’s simple training mode: just you, the court and dozens of balls being thrown at you.
The actual gameplay is as light-hearted as you would expect fro the franchise. You can choose been topspin, slice and underhand for your serves. To hit the ball, you can choose between lob, slice, topspin and drop shots. The various returns are mapped to different buttons and you can control where the ball goes by using the analog stick. The game does allow for some finesse by using timing to determine if the ball will really go there but it generally doesn’t make a huge difference. Nonetheless, the game moves at a decent pace and the matches don’t last very long.
The game’s graphics are simple yet stylized and cute. The characters are mostly boys and girls around various countries that have crazy animations when something goes well or poorly. The courts are located in a country club, beach, etc and look okay. The audio doesn’t fare nearly as well. The sound effects are okay, but the character voices are more annoying than cute and the music is fairly bad.
Overall, Hot Shots Tennis does the job just fine for someone looking for a cheerful tennis game on the PS2. It doesn’t do anything exceptionally well, but is entertaining as long as you aren’t expecting anything deep. -- Jake Wilson, PGNx Media
---- Sep 4, 2007
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