5 minute read
AO INTERNATIONAL TENNIS
The Rod Laver stadium, licensed in the game, is named after Australia’s most famous player, who won loads of grand slams back in the ’60s
PUBLISHER BIG ANT STUDIOS / DEVELOPER BIG ANT STUDIOS / FORMAT XBOX ONE / RELEASE DATE OUT NOW / COST £39.99
WHAT THE DEUCE IS THIS? A TENNIS GAME ON XB1! CHRIS BURKE
The wait for a decent tennis game on Xbox One feels longer than the 2010 Isner versus Mahut Wimbledon slogathon. But this year, fans of the game get a choice of two titles; the forthcoming Tennis World Tour, and the first to throw up chalk from OXM’s baseline, AO International Tennis.
The AO stands for Australian Open, and this is the principal license here; so you can have a crack at playing the Aussie Open itself, with the most famous tennis courts from down under represented, and with just a couple of major player licences, most notably Rafa Nadal, Angelique Kerber, Hyeon Chung, Karolina Pliskova and Naomi Osaka. Beyond that, you’re given some French and US Open-esque and Wimbledon-alike courts, so you can play on hard courts, clay and grass.
But, whilst the licensing is scarce, the game boasts a very comprehensive player creation suite, so those who are slick with a slider can make their favourite players, or you can download community creations of tennis’s top names. You can add your own face via a PC companion app that will capture your likeness. Adding to this is the ability to create logos and arenas too.
So, taking our strangely boat-faced Roger Federer (we’re not that hot at the creation tool just yet) onto ‘Centre Court’ at ‘Wimbledon’, we face the ‘real’ Rafa Nadal and after no time at all find ourselves 6-0 down in the first set on Rookie level as we realise it’s been way, way too long since we picked up a virtual racket in the name of Xbox…
New balls
Initially our frustrated attempts to play the kind of arcade-style game we remember so fondly from Virtua Tennis lead to McEnroe-style thrown rackets and choice words for the onscreen short cut
WHAT IS IT?
Australian Open-licensed tennis game with tons of possible customisation.
WHAT’S IT LIKE?
Top Spin, Virtua Tennis, you know… tennis games. WHO’S IT FOR?
Basketball fans, obviously. No, not really. Tennis fans. umpire, before we get to grips with the game’s more dynamic and strategic control mechanic.
Whilst the basic types of shot – flat, slice and top-spin – are straightforward enough and mapped to the main buttons, a combination of triggers and direction give you the options of power-shots, lobs, long balls, short balls and more, all responsive and intuitive enough to allow for some quick flowing rallies. The key is in the timing; a coloured spot in the opponent’s court shows you the intended destination of your shot. This has a colour coding of green amber and red, dependent on the power of your shot versus placement – the power of your shots is determined by the timing of your button release. Moving the coloured spot with the left joystick before release of your intended shot allows for some accurate placement, and soon enough we’re playing some pretty decent returns.
FAR LEFT Spanish tennis champ Rafael Nadal is one of the players licensed in the game.
ABOVE Unsure which end of the racket to hold? The game will help you!
LEFT It’s not Wimbledon, but it could be. Except for the lack of rain stopping play.
The same can’t be said for serves. A one-button press-and-release at the right moment, as shown in the bar that appears next to the player’s head, is fussy and easy to get wrong, and even with a perfectly timed release, our serves most often result in a fault. This means, for us at least, it’s far easier to break your opponent’s serve than to hold service, and the number of faults and double-faults we have, even without trying to achieve (extremely difficult) aces, breaks the flow of play.
Conversely, the precision displayed by the AI players – frequent aces, seemingly no errors – means it’s like playing chess against the Kasparovbeating Deep Blue computer. On anything but the lowest ‘Rookie’ difficulty setting, you really have to play some seriously good shots to win, strategise the tennis-balls off it, and minimise your errors – although to be fair this is something that with practice is certainly achievable. That accuracy goes for the line-calls too. You can question the line judges’ decisions, but they’re never wrong; and whilst it’s a nice touch having the Hawk-Eye camera replay confirm that your shot is out, it’s a little redundant – a machine that doesn’t make mistakes telling you that the other machine that doesn’t make mistakes, didn’t make a mistake.
PERFECT MATCH
A PC-based companion app called PlayFace will let you add your own face from a photo onto character models, resulting, we hope, in a photo-realistic likeness that can then be uploaded to the Big Ant servers and downloaded to Xbox One. The app is free to use from www. bigant.com/AOTool.
Match point
Movement around the court is a little too restrictive, often stilted and unresponsive, with your player not even trying to reach some balls. Again, wanting more arcade freedom in our movement, we frequently find ourselves with feet glued to the court – even if we were hopelessly out of position, we’d like that to be on us, rather than have it prescribed.
Still, despite a little clunkiness and the tough single-player game (don’t go near doubles, unless you can think on so many levels at once you are in fact, omnipotent) AO is a decent tennis sim that, once you’ve put in a bit of practice, is both fun and realistic enough to bridge a gap between a ‘proper’ sports sim and an arcade tennis game. The different game modes, including a decent career mode, that fully-licenced Australian Open tournament, casual jump-in option and online play, will keep you busy, and with just about everything you can think of fully customisable from match lengths to the game rules, tennis fans should ‘love’ it. Arf.
OXM VERDICT
The mix of solid arcade play and deeper-delve spor ts sim should please tennis fans.
