2K brings Top Spin back from retirement, but can’t quite serve an ace.
Tennis and video gaming have been intertwined since the beginning, but in recent years the pickings have been slim. After the hiatus of popular series like Sega’s Virtua Tennis and 2K’s Top Spin, several competitors (most notably AO Tennis) have attempted to crack through the market, but with generally poor reception. It’s no surprise then that there was plenty of excitement when 2K announced earlier this year that they were bringing their seminal tennis series back with Top Spin 2K25. The sports gaming landscape has changed quite a bit since the last Top Spin was released in 2011. Unfortunately, while the on-court gameplay is still as crisp as ever, it’s clear that 2K25 needed some more time in the oven to catch up to modern player expectations and justify its $70 price tag.
Top Spin 2K25 is built off the Top Spin 4 engine (the aforementioned 2011 release), and that both helps and hurts Hanger 13 here. Using the 13-year-old engine definitely helps the gameplay live up to the tight, strategic, and flexible action the series is known for. If you’re looking for an arcade experience here, this is not the tennis game for you. You’ll need to learn and utilize your entire catalog of shots to beat the AI on higher difficulty levels, which means mastering an intuitive but intimidating set of controls and systems.
MSRP: $59.99
Platforms: Xbox (reviewed), PlayStation, PC
Price I’d Pay: $29.99
Your player has access to 5 different groundstroke shot types (flat shots, cut shots, lob shots, drop shots, and topspin shots) with three different power levels (control shots, power shots, and normal shots). Control shots are exactly what they sound like, shots with a high degree of control but not much power. You’ll play these by tapping the button with the correct timing as the ball approaches after the bounce. To assist in your timing, 2K25 adds a shot meter which is a huge improvement over the old meter-less way to judge whether you were too early, too late, or just right. Power shots require you to hold the shot button until a circular meter at the bottom of the screen fills up and turns red. You’ll get a lot more power out of these shots, but they aren’t as easy to control so you’ll need to make sure your timing and positioning is solid. Normal shots are, as you might expect, a balanced shot timed between control and power. In addition, you have three different types of volley shots (power, flat, and drop) as well as 5 different types of serves (utilizing either the buttons or the right stick for advanced techniques).
This level of complexity ensures a ton of strategy in shot selection, character creation, and court positioning but can be intimidating for new players. You’ll need to vary your shot types and power levels based on where you and your opponent are on the court and mix up your timings to keep them off balance. It can be confusing at first, but if you have any passing familiarity with tennis, you should pick it up relatively quickly. Thankfully, there is an excellent tutorial system here. Voiced by John McEnroe, the tutorial moves through basic and advanced tennis techniques by first explaining the tactics at play in a short video lesson before turning the player loose to practice the shots on their own. This system should ensure that even novices to the game of tennis can quickly grasp the concepts of each strategy before mastering the mechanics to put it into use. The tutorial here is almost a must play, especially if this is your first go around with a sim tennis experience.
While bringing back the already well-polished gameplay engine from Top Spin 4 was a great idea, it’s unfortunately not the only thing that feels like it tagged along from 2011. Visually, this game does not meet the expectations fans have for modern sports games. The character models are muddy, have waxy and outdated textures, and generally look at least a generation behind where they should be, which is especially egregious in a sport with a maximum of 4 players on the court at any time. This goes especially for created players, although the pros don’t look so hot either. The various courts around the world that you play in do look mostly great, but considering how much of the action is focused on the players themselves there are a lot more misses than hits in the graphical department.
The game is also very bare-bones in terms of modes and features, which is pretty shocking considering how much depth most modern sports games have in this area. There are exhibition matches as one would expect, for both singles and doubles, and the game is undoubtedly best when you’re playing with other friends locally on the same machine, and it’ll have you wanting to round up 3 of your best friends to play some trash-talk doubles until late in the night. Unfortunately, at launch, you’ll have to make sure those friends are in town because there are no private online exhibition matches. The only option for online exhibition matches at launch is Quickplay. The developers claim that they will add the private match feature by the end of May, so if that’s a deal breaker for you I would recommend holding off.
In terms of the online modes that are present here, you get two leaderboard-style modes (in addition to the aforementioned quickplay). The first is called 2K Tour and allows you to play online matches against other players using the included Tour Professionals, with daily objectives and featured professionals. The second, and the main event of the online modes on offer here, is World Tour. In this mode, you’ll use your MyPlayer to play matches and tournaments against other players, earning points and making your way up the leaderboards. Both modes are decent ways to spend your time, but the lack of private matches damages the overall online experience for the title.
Anyone who has read a sports game review of mine (or listened to me on the podcast) knows that 99% of my time in any sports game is in career mode. Top Spin’s career is decent for a first bite at the apple, but it definitely can’t hold a candle to the pinnacles of the genre like Road to the Show or 2K’s own NBA 2K series. The basic gist of the mode involves balancing your player’s energy level by selectively playing different events across the world month to month. You’ll have training events that help to increase your players earned XP (ultimately giving you points to spread across attributes you would expect like Serve, Power, Speed, and Forehand/Backhand), Special Events which usually involve a gimmick of some sort (including smashing panes of glass, in a call back to old school Top Spin) and often award something special in return like merchandise or player housing, and of course tournaments.
The tourneys are, of course, the most important thing waiting for you at the end of every month and feature a huge selection of events (both real and fictional) from around the world. While you’ll start by playing smaller scale tournaments, as your player increases their overall world rank you will eventually secure invites to larger 250 and 500 tournaments and, ultimately, major championships.
As I mentioned, balancing your energy is very important in this mode and it’s easy to get out over your skis by doing every single option available to you. Fatigue can quickly turn into injuries, which can force you out of action, so you’ll want to make sure you take your breaks when you can. This rest mechanic basically allows you to skip to the next month (or more than that depending on your fatigue level) although you’ll see some negative impact to your rank from skipping events.
The game also gives you plenty of other ways to conserve your energy and improve your play on the court through coaches and staff members. You can only have one Coach active at any given time, and they’ll allow you to earn bonus VC or XP, or even give attribute bonuses once you’ve unlocked challenges. The staff members are unlocked later and can help increase the amount of fatigue you recover, decrease time missed for injuries, and increase your earnings. You can also unlock homes in every region, which give specific bonuses (along with extra bonuses for the home you designate as primary). Overall, there’s a decent amount to muck through here but I ultimately found it all pretty shallow. The benefits from the coaches and staff members are fine but are mostly just superficial ways to improve your attributes or reduce the grind of energy restoration. I found the energy loss mechanic to be relatively tedious, and it didn’t positively impact the way I felt about the mode. It has the unfortunate side effect of making the training and special events, repetitive in their own right, feel like hassles that negatively impact your performance where it counts come tournament time. In general, the mode is a good way to move from match to match and enjoy the on-court gameplay, but certainly not engrossing in any sort of rewarding way.
One area connected to MyCareer/MyPlayer that I’m excited to report is that, unlike NBA 2K, VC is not used to level up your player. VC in the game is used for cosmetic items, for resetting your stats back to zero if you want to redo your character build, for buying player housing and more. Your mileage may vary depending on the kind of things you like to do in a game like this, but I didn’t find the presence of the VC to be as overwhelming disgusting as in the NBA series. I will say that there is at least one pair of sneakers available for sale on the VC store that is currently bugged, so don’t spend your 350 VC on the NikeCourt Air Zoom Vapor 11 epic shoes in the Pro Shop, because while they’ll show “Owned” you won’t be able to find them in your locker room.
Last but not least, it wouldn’t be a game released in 2024 if it didn’t have a battle pass. Top Spin calls their version the “Centre Court Pass” and it features an instantly familiar tiered reward structure where you earn rewards by accumulating season pass points that unlocks various XP bonuses, merchandise, outfits for pro players, and VC itself. The current plan is for 6 of these passes throughout the year (themed based on the actual pro tennis event seasons) and you can buy the pass for $9.99 each or upgrade all seasons to premium for $39.99. Ultimately whether these passes are worth picking up is heavily dependent on how much you play the game and how much you care about what’s included. For me, they seemed uninspiring, but they do include some neat, licensed gear for your created character.
I’m so glad that Top Spin has made a return after such a long hiatus, but I wish it had come back in a more polished and rounded-out form. The game feels rushed to market and comes up short of its full $70 price tag (up to $120 for the Grand Slam edition that includes the Centre Court passes and some other cosmetics). It’s saved by its excellent on-court gameplay that stands among the peak sim tennis games and the amount of fun you can have playing local multiplayer with friends. If you’re a huge tennis fan, you’re going to have a blast smacking backhand winners and lobbing shots over charging players’ heads. A solid foundation has been laid here for a future release that expands the mode selections and puts some more meat on the bone. As it stands, all but the most hardcore should probably wait for a sale.
Review copy of game provided by publisher.
