The serve-strength indicator is...different.

Perhaps no real-life sport better adapts to videogames than tennis. (Pong, anyone?) So when the folks behind renowned sports sims Fight Night and NHL decided to take a crack at a thumbstick-driven pro-tennis game, we were excited. Unlike its cousins, however, Tennis’ dual-stick input scheme actually makes the game less appealing.

From your initial training sessions, Tennis’ right thumbstick — your virtual racket — frustrates. The directional nudges and movements are so ludicrously sensitive, requiring such precise timing and fluid motion, that we couldn’t reliably put the ball in the simple corner target the game requested. And it didn’t help to have fiery tennis legend John McEnroe (who joins Pat Cash as a commentator) yelling at us as we failed.

We eventually switched to a more traditional control method where the controller’s face buttons handle your shot types. This scheme makes Tennis way more playable, although it turns out there’s not much else to the game besides a menu-tastic career mode. (Why must we button through so many screens to enter a match?) The two-man play-by-play commentary is a welcome feature in a tennis game, but it very quickly repeats itself. Meanwhile, the player creator is woefully limited if you don’t use the GameFace feature to import your photo, and the skill system doesn’t engage you much during your career. Quite simply, there’s little reason to choose this game over the far superior Top Spin 4.

PUBLISHER: EA  •  DEVELOPER: EA Canada  •  ESRB: Everyone  •  MULTIPLAYER: 2–4 on same screen or Xbox Live  •  ACHIEVEMENTS: Time-intensive  •  COST: $60

On Xbox 360

+ Play-by-play commentary; playable pros are both classic (McEnroe, Evert, Becker) and current (Federer, Sharapova).

– Frustrating right-thumbstick controls.

– Too many damn menus to sift through.

? Where’s the Kinect support to let us yell at the umpires, McEnroe-style?

6.0