The entire idea behind Playstation Plus as far as I can see is that we are supposed to pay for a subscription and get a few games here and there for the price of said "admission." For the most part these games are washed up games that nobody is buying anymore and that is to be expected because the PSP experience is just a few dollars a month. I'm not expecting the world here.
Lately however, the games they are offering aren't really games as all but just microtransaction nightmares.
They aren't even trying to hide it anymore. This is a game where how you can perform is almost completely dependent on whether or not you want to sink hundreds of hours into monotonous gameplay or if you want to buy some of their in-game currency with real world money to speed the process along.
When you start giving us games like this with our Playstation Plus membership, it is no longer an incentive. These games are already free-to-play and you are just duping us into thinking we are getting a game added to our library that we could have had anyway for free or near free.
The options available to you upon firing this game up for the first time is just embarrassing. Ok, they let you use Nadal or Federer, you don't have to unlock them, but if you want to play as just about anyone else you have to earn credits or of course, get out your credit card and just straight up buy it.
I DESPISE micro-transactions and pay-to-win schemes in gaming and when this comes across my PSP account, it makes me want to cancel it.
The game looks reasonably good but just like a lot of sports games that exist right now it is unnecessarily complicated especially when you consider the fact that the original was produced by a completely different production team and was a disaster that everyone hated and no one bought. There is so much going on as far as just hitting the ball back and forth that really could have been left to people who want to have a complicated experience. In my first hour of gameplay I had the screen telling me that I was hitting something too early or too late and in the meantime I am just trying to serve, I don't even know what button does that and it really shouldn't matter.
The "card" system that they implemented into the game is meant to give you "boosts" during your match and was obviously thought up by someone that thought here would be a few tennis fans out there that would break out the real world cash to buy some of these to give their player an edge in a virtual match or even better, in multiplayer.
The game was convoluted and stupid enough without this becoming a factor and I can't imagine many people that actually get far enough into this terrible game to actually be concerned about a 7% boost to a slice for one set. I don't know anymore these days though, it seems as though the world is slowly being taken over by idiots and the fact that they even bother making games like this is more proof of that.
This game could have been great I guess, but i'll never know since the Playstation Plus version of it was so stripped back and obviously designed to get you to spend real world money to unlock stuff that I will never even give the game much of a chance. I played two matches, barely understood what the hell was going on except that this game definitely wants to get me into microtransactions, then deleted it. I think that a vast majority of the other people have done so as well because it currently has a 2 out of 5 star rating on the PS network which is tough to accomplish since almost nobody even bothers to review anything on there.
Big Ant studios is the company responsible for this game and I don't know or care what else they have produced but his one game is enough for me to avoid anything that this company is involved with in the future.