REVIEW : Tennis Manager 2022 (PC)
If you enjoy sports simulation games, you may have heard about the release of this one. If not, don’t worry; it’s an incredibly well-made game that’s garnering attention for its realism. It has the feel of a true sports sim, it’s highly detailed, and when you play it, you get the sense that you’re living in a game. The game includes a good tutorial that explains how to play as well as replays to help you learn.
Tennis Manager 2022 is a sports simulation game developed and published by The Code Factory, a Bulgarian gaming publisher. It was released on April 15th, 2022, and has since been downloaded over 1,000,000 times. The game has a strong AI engine and allows the player to control a world-famous tennis player and lead them through tournaments and matches.
Tennis Manager 2022 is the latest instalment in the Rebound CG franchise, which debuted last year and is ready to improve the experience. It’s a shame I didn’t get to test the 2021 version (go ahead if you want to know exactly what’s improved because I only know on paper), but as you can imagine, it puts you in charge of a tennis team with one goal in mind: to make their tennis players the best in the world by winning tournaments and climbing the world rankings.
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg; Tennis Manager 2022 can go as deep as you want it to: from the most meticulous hiring and management to small training sessions, from press conferences to tournament registration, it’s all in your hands. Giving encouragement to your tennis player during a match or changing the strategy to win is only a small part of the process, which Rebound CG understands.
Tennis Manager 2022 looks, perhaps too much, like Football Manager, even in its worst form. This applies to its system and menu design, which are quite unclear and very confusing for newcomers, and perhaps too difficult given their complexity.
In Football Manager, I know how everything works and I control it from the first minute, but not because it didn’t take me several years to accept it. It has cost me a lot of money to adapt here, and not just because it is a sport that I control to a lesser extent on a general level.
Everything happens, and it’s difficult to recognise what you’re doing correctly, what you’re doing incorrectly, or even what you’re doing that you shouldn’t or shouldn’t be doing. It’s a big mess, and you’ll probably have to delegate some of the responsibility to your technical team. Also, and this may be a personal bias, tennis is a very different sport from other team sports, and this shows in what you can and cannot manage in Tennis Manager 2022.
You will begin by creating your manager profile and deciding whether to enter the game as the manager of one of the available schools or to create your own. Each of them has several tennis players from various categories and global positions, and you must manage them all (or focus only on the main one, here the freedom is absolute). Prepare for matches, manage training levels, contracts, the most personal requests, meet school needs…
If you are unfamiliar with management games, the UI may take some time to get used to; however, if you are, the UI is clean, easy to use, and follows a fairly familiar structure, so you should have no trouble getting used to it.
Tennis Manager 2022 demonstrates the care and dedication that went into its development. Even minor details, such as colour-coding emails and providing hyperlinks to scouted players, demonstrate the creators’ attention to detail and commitment.
Tennis Manager 2022 Management & Customization
Players will have a choice of managers, as in most sports management games nowadays, but Tennis Manager 2022 goes a step further by allowing them to choose from the following:
- Gender
- Manager-in-training
- Managerial Position
- Manager with a long history
More games are embracing gender equality, which is fantastic, but the ability to choose between age groups is also beneficial.
Tennis Manager 2022’s manager creation screen.
Another fantastic feature of Tennis Manager 2022 is the ability to create your club in addition to choosing from several existing clubs.
Although the game warns you not to do so on your first playthrough, if you’re a seasoned sports management gamer, you should be fine, but if you’re not, it’s better to learn the ropes first before starting your club.
After joining a club, you’ll need to assign staff to your players. These people will help you keep your players healthy and physically strong by running training circuits with them. Tennis Manager 2022 will fulfil any grandiose dreams of building your tennis academy and developing a stable of talent that will hopefully produce a champion or two over the years for hardcore tennis fans. Its strength lies in the extensive menus, which allow you to navigate through a plethora of screens, each with options that can influence the trajectory of your academy as a whole or a specific player. The real brands with which you can sign contracts add authenticity to the experience and allow you to transform each player into someone with a distinct personality.
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