Virtua Tennis was seen as the pinnacle of Tennis games last generation. However there was one other title: an Xbox exclusive known as Top Spin was an ace of a game with realistic physics, great graphics and sound, coupled with online play. After Microsoft sold off the developer to 2K Sports, the discouraged developer set on making the sequel. With the 360 and GBA version being fantastic, this would definitely mean the DS version is also really good...Right?

At its core, Top Spin 2 isn't a bad game by any means. It's a tennis game with a simple enough learning curve and a decent career mode filled with mini games and tournaments. The main mechanics and controls of the game are very simple. The face buttons control your main shots such as the 'safe shot' and 'top spin'. These are easily executed; however using L or R will make you do a timed shot, where obviously your timing has to be perfect. The game itself plays out as any generic tennis game does. There are 3 games in a set, 1 or more sets in a match depending on the rules of the tournament. This is no Mario Power Tennis; there are no gimmick courts or power shots.

You'd think that this would make a good game. But Top Spin 2 is let down by one of the worst and unpredictable frame rates I've ever witnessed. As anyone who's ever played Tennis virtually or in real life would know, Tennis is a game of accuracy and timing. Due to the problems in Top Spin 2, you'll have issues with both of these. It wouldn't be so bad if you knew that some slowdown was about to come along, but you just don't. At one point the game slowed down to a near slideshow and others it has simply stopped dead during play for a couple of seconds. It's like playing on an N-Gage or something; the games most stable offering is at about 15 frames per second so you'll never really have a quick game. The accuracy is the other problem, when either using the zoomed or the far camera it's hard to tell where the ball is going to hiton yours or your opponents side of the net. If this wasn't bad enough the game has loading times. I mean, jesus, the thing is running off a memory card - what on Earth does it have to load?!

As previously mentioned, Top Spin 2 has a variety of mini games. They are fairly simple affairs and doing them will increase your player's statistics (speed, power, volley, serve etc.), they however can only be accessed through the career mode. The mini games are level based, when you first play one of them its a simple easy affair, if you return the mini games will become more demanding, asking for more points or requiring more skilful shots. The bulk of the game is of course 1 on 1 Tennis matches: they don't last all that long either but the learning curve is quite tough. The AI will get a lot of aces past you on your first few tries so it's fairly brutal. The later matches seem to take forever, with many games and sets in each match. As your stats increase these games will become quite easy, even then they just become long and drawn out. Annoyingly, you can't save between the matches within tournaments so you either have to go through an entire tournament in one sitting or put the DS into sleep mode when you want to stop. The game also has an extreme lack of touch screen use. Your stylus' only outing will be to touch 'Press Start'. That's right, you can't even use the touch screen during the menus.

Apart from the terrible frame rate and weird accuracy that plagues this game like the Black Death, there are unsurprisingly more problems. But first of all, let's have a couple of positives shall we? This game actually has quite a nice 3D engine, if it was better optimised it would be really good; and the real world players are a great addition to the game. Finally, you can even beat Tim Henman! (Although it's not much of a feat these days) So, now the bad things. The animations are clunky, slow and unnatural even for a DS game; secondly, all the character models are really blocky. There's no real detail on the faces of the players and they really lack emotion. Another problem is the clipping errors: the ball for example can fly through walls and out of the game world; surely it wouldn't be that hard to put a wall there instead of just a texture?

The sound is some how even worse than the graphics, I'll honestly admit I have no idea how they managed it. I wish to find the person who did the commentating and kill them, there's just something about his voice that's terrible. He only has a few things to say and it's ear bleedingly bad! Not only that, but there's only one crowd cheering sound... which gets very repetitive. Also, your player only has one grunt sound when they hit the tennis ball back which gets more and more grating as time goes on.

This game is a disappointment to say the least. As much as I wanted to love this game like I have other tennis games like Virtua Tennis and the Mario Tennis series, I just couldn't. There are a million and one flaws in this game and to be honest, with the GBA version being better, I have no idea how it shipped.