Tennis On-Court Review

Pilot an X-Wing, drive a supercar around a world-class circuit and work a day in a corporate office without questioning all my life’s decisions are a handful of impossible scenarios that virtual reality can offer. While I love the escapism, there are a few everyday activities that are elevated by way of VR, even turning someone allergic to sports, like myself, into an athlete. Developed by Fishing Cactus, Tennis On-Court falls into the latter category, attempting to serve up an authentic tennis experience, just without the heatstroke and sore knees.

Just about anyone with a basic understanding of the sport would be capable of sliding on the VR headset and striking up a rally. Provided it does take some time to find your bearings, Tennis On-Court is a one-to-one simulation of a real match, with a full-sized court, regulation rackets and eery silence while the ball is in motion. With some excellent controller tracking you can very naturally alter your power and type of shot by adjusting your swing or rotating your hand. You won’t be ready for Wimbledon with one game in rear-view, but the mechanics behind your shots and the physics on the ball do make for a realistic overall feel..

Depending on your confidence, you can choose between arcade or realistic gameplay options. While still challenging, the arcade option turns on assists that aid in serving, ball trajectory and positioning, while switching to realistic turns them all off. Mercifully, you’re able to manually toggle these assists, letting you customise your gameplay and find what fits.

I’m a set down, but I’m not out

Unless you can force your opponent into doing the chasing, you’ll need to move around the court a fair bit. Thankfully, there are several movement options to choose from, depending on your preference and stomach strength. If you’re looking for the Wii Sports experience, or prefer to focus solely on the swing, you can teleport to the ball, or be guided around by automatic movement. Otherwise, the manual setting has you controlling your movements with the left thumbstick, complete with a sprint that can be toggled with a button press.

There are a total of six stadiums to play in, each providing a great sense of scale and, were it not for the cardboard cutout spectators, spectacle. As well as offering some visual variety, the stadiums also present three different surfaces to play on, each with its own feel and playstyle. I’m no tennis expert, so I can’t break down the minute difference between clay, hard and grass courts, but I could genuinely notice a change when moving from one to the other.

After creating your own avatar using a limited number of cosmetic options, you can take to the court against an AI in a singles match, take part in an offline tournament, or your can be brave and tackle a match in online multiplayer. Outside of setting the parameters for number of games to a set and sets to a match, you’re also able to choose the difficulty of your AI opponent, though it won’t exactly make much of a difference. Whether you select easy or pro, your computer-controlled rival will frequently miss shots seemingly on purpose, smash the ball over the line and return all shots in a vanilla fashion.

The different courts offer more than just a visual shakeup 

If you’ve got an afternoon spare, you might want to jump into an offline tournament, although there’s very little incentive to do so. Each tournament consists of five back-to-back matches against the same few simple AI opponents you face in regular one-off games, with the added frustration of not being able to save your progress. Worse still, there’s no option to play doubles when you’re offline, in a tournament or otherwise, severely limiting your options and hampering the game’s replayability.

While doubles matches are an option when playing online, I wish you luck trying to find a match, let alone one that’s stable. During my time with Tennis On-Cort, I managed to play exactly one single and one doubles match, and neither were enjoyable, or even manageable. The already bland character models would move in unnatural ways, the ball would get confused as to where it was in the online space and the overall delay made the whole experience unbearable.

Replays from a spectator perspective really highlight the awkward character models 

In hopes that the online multiplayer becomes playable, you might want to sharpen your skills. A decent enough training suite teaches you the basics of serving, forehand, backhand and the like, but it’s awfully dry. I certainly benefited from the mode, but returning balls to an empty court could be spiced up with the inclusion of a minigame, or a novelty target. Let me serve balls at 120 km/h at hapless ball boy, something, anything.

Final Thoughts

Tennis On-Court’s core mechanics, spot on control scheme and impressive ball physics provide a good foundation for a fun VR tennis game, but the structure built upon it is one-dimensional, bland and unstable. A lack of game modes and meaningful difficulty options make the single-player portion of the game painfully one-note, while the multiplayer options will go untouched thanks to woeful technical issues. There’s an entertaining VR sport game in here somewhere, but a good amount of work will need to go into finding it.

Reviewed on PS5 // Review code supplied by publisher

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