Raising your popularity means you can get into tournaments without qualifying and also adds legs to the career mode, which if played at a reasonable click won’t last all that long. All of this progression is made with a view to earning money and enhancing your popularity, which in Virtua Tennis 4 is displayed with stars.
There are also “injury spots”, both minor and major, which will have an effect on your fatigue level, though there are pretty easy to avoid with some careful planning.Īs you progress, you unlock all manner of costumes, including fancy dress items that enable you to take part in the special fancy dress exhibition matches. Now however, there are also management stops, which allow you to buy tickets (you get them automatically when you run out but buying them allows you to pick the value of the ticket manually), rest-tickets, shuffle-cards and eventually sponsorship cards, which allow you to get cash and popularity bonuses. Throughout the map, there are the obvious locations such as matches, tournaments and rest stops. With this new ticket system, you don’t end up doing the same training mini-games over and over, and there’s little point in having a favourite because you may not get a chance to play it again for a while. Virtua Tennis’ career mode has always had a faux-RPG element, but it never really followed through and instead fell back on obscene levels of repetition. After a while however, you’ll start to understand why this decision was made. These tickets have a value, which is the amount of moves you are allowed to make on that turn (think a dice roll, only with predetermined outcomes).Īt first, this seems like an incredibly poor design choice which stops you from picking what you want to do and when you want to do it. Now, the career mode is broken down into separate seasons and whilst the map returns, it is totally different. Whereas in previous titles, you could go anywhere you want on the map, picking any mini-game you wish, this system has been totally overhauled for Virtua Tennis 4.
VIRTUA TENNIS 4 PC REVIEW SERIES
GAMEPLAY: The biggest change to the series is in the World Tour mode. The crowd is serviceable, which is really all you could ever expect from a tennis title. Grunting is as it should be, with special mention going to the most camp grunt you’ve ever heard a man make. The sound effects of ball on racquet are great, and the peripheral court sounds are nice too, for example the screeching on an artificial court. There is no option to simply turn it off during matches yet retain it in the menus, so it’s either always on, or always off. The music is horrible, and I eventually resorted to just turning it off. Virtua Tennis 4 is a very arcade-style game, and as such, you’ll hear lots of arcade-style noises. SOUND: As is normal with a tennis game, there isn’t an awful lot to write home about.
In that respect, get used to mashing the X button (on a PlayStation 3) to skip these scenes, over and over again. During a match, line-judges will frequently have no reaction to getting pelted in the knee or groin with a tennis ball, and when you see a ball boy running across the court, you’ll wonder why they bothered, since a replay or cut-scene will interrupt the flow of the match, again. In play of course, you won’t notice an awful lot of this, but the invasive replays and mini cut-scenes during matches highlight all of the above. Whilst the players’ animations are an absolute joy to behold, get up close and the non-licenced players can look grotesque! Worse yet, the sweat effect is very strange and gives the created players a wax-like appearance, and let’s not even get started on how strange players’ teeth look! However, there are some serious visual inconsistencies at play. GRAPHICS: As you would expect, Virtua Tennis 4 is the prettiest game in the series to date, with tennis courts that look magnificent. But for this entry into the franchise, is it enough? With PlayStation Move, 3D, and Kinect support, every base is covered in Virtua Tennis 4 and the original development team are even on the case.
Given that the last outing felt somewhat definitive, how much further could SEGA really go with an arcade Tennis title? However, with its arcade leanings, Virtua Tennis is a series that feels as though it has been around forever. It has been two years since the last Virtua Tennis game, and many gamers appreciate that SEGA don’t just wheel out the same game each year, iterating upon it in a gradual, piecemeal way. Available on: PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii, PC (Reviewed on PlayStation 3)
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