Top Spin 2 PC Review (2007)

Positives:
Easy installation. No going online, etc.
Graphics and sound effects good.
Character creation great. Can customize body (proportions, height), hair, facial features (eyes, nose, chin, mouth, etc.) This was very similar to a Tiger Woods golf game.
Career mode good - training, coaches, tournaments, etc.

Negatives:
No option to set difficulty of game. No adjustment for mouse sensitivity.
No option to set perspective. Sometimes you would be behind your character as in any other third person perspective game. Then other times it would switch and you would be looking at your character from the other side of the court. You could not select one or the other or both.
After every point you had to watch players' reactions. That got old very fast.

Controls were extremely difficult to use. (I was using keyboard and a corded, optical mouse) When serving you would click W,A,S, or D to start serve, then watch a power scale and try to click again when it was at maximum. That part was o.k. The problem was with returns. First you would move the mouse to where the ball was hit toward. Then you would hit W,A,S, or D for your swing type selection, (holding it down for more power and precision), then move the mouse forward, backward, left, right, or diagonally to aim your shot. Mind you, this is all in the fraction of a second that it takes for the ball to reach your side of the court. The easiest option was to use the S key for a safe shot. That shot would always stay in bounds. Of course you still had to get to the correct location in time which wasn't always easy. Even if you hit 10-15 safe returns in a row your opponent (even low level players) would 95% of the time match you shot for shot until you got caught out of position and missed. To have a better chance of scoring you had to use a "risk" shot. For those you would again use the mouse to get into position, then press and hold the spacebar, press W,A,S, or D (which now brought up a meter to watch) and hold till the indicator was in the top position. (it moves very fast) Oh, and as mentioned before, once you pressed your shot selection button the mouse now switches from moving the character to aiming your shot. In all I played about 120 games and was able to win only 2 times!

The time to uninstall the game was the longest I ever encountered. It made me wonder what it was doing.

In summary I could not recommend this game to anyone except the very best players. The controls are just way too difficult for average, casual gamers. (at least with a mouse and keyboard)