Smash Court Tennis 3 is meant to be a tennis simulator giving you a realistic view of the game and trying to make you feel like you are actually playing the game instead of sitting there in front of a TV with your controller in hand. But to be quite honest it fails to even make you feel like you’re watching the sport on the TV much less playing it. Smash Court fails really to even serve up a decent volley of gameplay with numerous let downs from the most basic of gameplay to graphical design.

It’s a massive shame that the game really doesn’t measure up to the likes of Top Spin and Virtua Tennis, by way of actually having a feel for the game of tennis. I mean, Smash Court Tennis 3 almost feels exactly like the PSP game that was released about a year ago with just a bit of a higher resolution gloss and I really do mean a bit! The graphics leave much to be desired, most of the character models have small amounts of detail on them offering vague look-a-likes to the world-class tennis players that they are trying to represent. Thanks to the poor character modelling Roger Federer was the only player for sure that I could definitely say who he was, otherwise I was pretty clueless in this respect.

Fortunately the courts that feature in the game have fared a bit better than that of the characters but not by much. Each court, of course, is very much like the last or indeed like that next but with slight changes to the design and what ground type it is. There are some nice effects like the time of day affecting the kind of light level you get, but it isn’t in real-time so as your match goes on the time of day will stand still.

Surprisingly the graphics aren’t actually the biggest fall down of the game, the mechanics of the gameplay are all over the place. The biggest problem that Smash Court has is that the characters move around the court so slow that it is damaging to your game. Take Roger Federer for example, he is said to be one of the fastest men to ever have played tennis, but this really doesn’t show at all in the game. All of the characters bumble around the court missing shots that could have been easily caught. You do have a dash button that gives a boost to your speed but this also causes a new problem in that you have to stop before you can attack the ball, so most of the time you get there to intercept the shot but just not in enough time to be able to return the ball successfully. 

There is a set of RPG like level systems that allow you to progress and increase the potency of your character. Experience is gained through the duration of a tournament and only handed out by winning matches and taking part in training exercises. There are two bars that are to be managed in a tournament, your level bar which fills up over the course of a tournament and shows how far you are away from your next level, the other is a stamina bar. The stamina bar needs to be carefully looked after by taking rests and at times doing training to improve the bar instead of constantly attacking the main matches.

Training is possibly the most fun that you can have in the whole game, which is saying something because it really isn’t anything that special either. The training has a mini-game theme with you doing things like serving to certain areas or targets and returning shots from a ball machine. These games take a very serious premise unlike that of some of the more arcade style tennis games.