On paper, AO International Tennis has all of the makings to
be a solid tennis game. It has the official Australian Open license (so, yeah,
AO doesn’t stand for the ESRB “Adults Only” rating here, darn), incredibly
robust player and stadium creation tools, plenty of modes, and a unique control
scheme that seems like it will give you all the tools you need to make any shot
you want. Then you try to actually play it and it turns out it isn’t any fun at
all. The A.I. is mediocre at best and the controls are awkward and, even worse,
the game automatically moves your player around and the drop shot is totally
broken and overpowered to the point it is basically an instant win button. AO
International Tennis is just not a good tennis game. Continue reading for all
of the details.
Game Details
- Publisher: Big Ant Studios
- Developer: Big Ant Studios
- ESRB Rating: “E” for Everyone
- Genre: Tennis
- Pros: Fantastic character creator; neat control scheme
- Cons: Drop shots; automatic movement; it ain’t fun
- MSRP: $50
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AO International Tennis features the official Australian
Open tournament license and … not much else as far as real events go. This
isn’t a huge problem, but it just seems weird to have one big flashy thing to
hang your hat on and nothing else. The player roster is similarly out of wack
as it has the great Rafael Nadal in all his glory with a bunch of relative
nobodies (sorry, I don’t follow tennis much) rounding out the rest of the real
players. Again, I don’t mind the lack of recognizable names, but its weird to
essentially focus the licensing on one major star and one tournament (and not
even the one Nadal is most associated with, which is the French Open).
Making up for the lackluster roster is one of the most
impressively robust player creation tools we’ve seen in a long, long time. The
amount of options you have to tweak every aspect of your player’s appearance is
pretty incredible. The created characters look just as good as the pre-made
characters, too, so they don’t have that “obviously a created character” look
like so many games end up with. With some time and patience you can fill out
the roster with pretty stunning created versions of real players, which is
cool. The game even has the names of a lot of top players not in the game built
into the voice work for stadium announcers. The stadium creation tool is
similarly robust, too, if you want to recreate your favorite real world
tournaments.
AO International Tennis is fully-featured when it comes to
modes. Exhibition matches, training, local and online multiplayer, and an
interesting career mode where stamina plays a major role and actually takes
getting tired from traveling to events into account.
All of the modes and features and neat creation tools in the
world can’t make a bad playing game good, however, and that is ultimately the
problem with AO International Tennis. First, the OK parts. The control
scheme is fairly standard with the face buttons representing different shot
types with additional shots – like the drop shot – available by holding a
modifier button. You swing your racquet by holding a shot button and releasing
it with the proper power (indicated onscreen). If you hold it too long,
however, your shot may not go where you want it. There is also a little cursor
onscreen that shows you roughly where your shot is going to land, which is
pretty cool since you can actually aim your shots and be pretty precise with
how you play.
That all sounds good, but when you’re actually playing it
kind of falls apart for a number of reasons, the most egregious of which is the
fact that the game moves your player around for you. You do have movement
control, albeit pretty sluggish and slow, but when you press a button to start
a swing the game automatically moves you into what it considers the “proper”
position. What this means is that even if you want to dive or reach or switch
to forehand or backhand to position yourself better for the next shot, you
can’t unless the game decides that is the way it is going to move you. It feels
awful. It’s like playing Mario Kart with the handling assist on.
The gameplay also has a massive, massive flaw and that is
the fact that the A.I. is terrible and hitting drop shots is pretty much an
instant win. The A.I. is completely unprepared to charge the net to counter a
drop shot so you can just hit drop shots all day and win. Playing real human
opponents presents the same problem but with the added issue of not being able
to retreat into the backcourt fast enough to counter a lob when you just had to
crash the net to return a drop shot. What it boils down to is that playing the
A.I. is boring and playing real humans is frustrating and boring. Not fun.
AO International Tennis also doesn’t have particularly good
presentation, either. The player models do look pretty good, but the animation
is really stilted and not smooth and every player moves and plays pretty much
the same. The Australian Open’s Rod Laver Arena looks good and is meticulously
detailed, but most of the other arenas are pretty bland and generic. The game’s
menus are also simple and generic and have ridiculously small text.
In the end, AO International Tennis just isn’t a very good
tennis game. It’s playable and not totally horrible or anything and you can get
used to its quirks, but it isn’t really any fun to play either against the A.I.
or real multiplayer opponents due to movement restrictions, drop shot cheesing,
and other things. I know it has been a while since we’ve had a new tennis game
on consoles, but AO International Tennis isn’t worth your time even if you’re
desperate. Skip it.
