PREVIEW : Matchpoint – Tennis Championships (PC)
Matchpoint – Tennis Championship is a modern take on tennis, with a true-to-life on-court experience, backed up by a deep career mode and a distinct rivalry system.
The game emphasises tactical realism, placement, and targeting, allowing the user to manoeuvre their superstar in precisely the perfect way to maximise the effectiveness of their shots.
Matchpoint – Tennis Championships blends smooth character animations, authentic ball physics, and better player control to recreate the game’s realistic rhythm, with each swing and hit feeling distinct and enjoyable.
How long has it been since the last truly fantastic tennis game was released? To put it in context, when Top Spin 4 was released in 2011, Ash Barty was still a teenager competing in junior tennis events. She’s won three grand slams, earned the women’s world number one rating, and withdrawn from the sport entirely – and the wait for a high-quality service and volley simulation to emerge as the heir to Top Spin 4’s reign continues. Matchpoint – Tennis Championships is the next challenger, and while it may be missing in terms of the licence and customising, it certainly appears to have a lot of potential on the court.
Matchpoint simply feels fantastic in your palm. The controls are straightforward and feel highly snappy, and it only took a handful of matches on the basic semi-pro mode for me to figure out how to balance my player’s energetic dashes and pivots with the more subtle steering of the shot reticle. Each point is also satisfyingly fluid; maker Torus Games claims over 1,300 separate motion-capture animations are used, and it shows, as there’s a level of realism in Matchpoint’s rallies that has been lacking in other tennis games in recent years.
The only component that appears to need further tweaking before launch is the serving, which appears to be a little too exact at the moment. I rapidly discovered that I could land every serve on a dime like Pete Sampras in his prime, smashing them out wide or down the tee with pinpoint accuracy and frequently finished each match with 100% first serves in. This looked dramatically out of sync with the general groundstrokes, which I occasionally pushed long or wide if I got out of position or was a little too bold, as they should.
While several of modern tennis’ biggest stars are sadly missing from the Matchpoint roster, the 16 licenced players include top ten players such as Daniil Medvedev, Carlos Alcarez, and Garbine Muguruza, as well as the constantly underachieving but always entertaining Australian, Nick Kyrgios. However, it’s a shame that the licenced roster is so uneven in terms of gender, with 11 licenced players from the men’s circuit compared to just five from the women’s. Furthermore, with no grand slam title between them, labelling bonus players Tommy Haas and Tim Henman “legends” of the sport seems like a reach that not even Boris Becker in his prime could pull off.
Rallies are relatively short, possibly because of our bad play, but it feels like you can become dominated if you don’t take control early – which, we assume, is authentic to the modern game. It’ll be fascinating to see if more defensive gameplay is possible once we’ve spent more time with the game — so far, we’ve found ourselves either dominating from the baseline or dropping points. We’re hoping for just enough depth to give this some legs.
Graphically, it’s not fantastic – especially on our ageing PC – but there’s some promise here. Licensed players such as Kei Nishikori and Garbine Muguruza are present, but we anticipate that the majority of the longevity will come from developing your player and propelling them to the top of the world rankings. Finally, we’re optimistic: the gameplay feels better than any of the more recent attempts we’ve tested, but we’ll have to wait and see how it holds up after a dozen hours of play because no tennis title has weathered the test of time quite like Top Spin 4.
To be clear, this Matchpoint: Tennis Championships hands-on is based on the PC build, not the PS5 or PS4 versions. With that in mind, are you curious about what Kalypso Media has to offer here? In the comments section, hit a forehand down the line.
