by Amr (@siegarettes)

• Super Tennis Blast
• Developer: Unfinished Pixel
• Publisher: Unfinished Pixel
• Switch, PC

Nobody I know plays tennis, but everyone has played videogame tennis. Alongside golf, tennis is one of the most ubiquitous sports in games. The mechanics have been iterated on and refined so many times over that everyone’s got their own expectations of what a tennis game should do. Super Tennis Blast mostly lives up to those expectations, even if it’s presented in a no-frills package.

Super Tennis Blast’s basics follow in the style of Virtua Tennis, asking you to pick your shot before the shot reaches, and automatically making small adjustments to get into position. This gives Tennis Blast a similar emphasis on positioning and prediction, with rewards for planting your feet as early as possible. The wrinkle here is the addition of the precision and charged shots, on top of the usual slice/flat/power/lob shots.

Instead of influencing the ball’s direction at the point of impact, planting your feet sets up an invisible cursor that allows you to aim for specific spots on the court. Holding a button allows you to charge the shot to give it more power at the expense of accuracy, while tapping, then tapping again as the ball reaches you adds more precision to your shot. It lends a lot of control to where you place a shot, though the invisible cursor also meant I found myself shooting way off court at times, since there wasn’t a visual marker to remind me not to absentmindedly hold a direction when aiming.

The extra control made an appreciable difference in campaign, where you can increase your stats slowly, meaning I had to hold back a little as my shots became stronger. That’s not true of the regular competitive modes, which does make competition flatter, in return for allowing you to create some decent looking avatars. There’s a good diversity in the default set of characters and available features, though options for hair and body shape are limited.

Each of these avatars are animated well, going for a more traditional animated look, with exaggerated features, flat shading, and movement that jumps between poses rather than using the smooth movement interpolation that 3D usually sticks with. Important animations like running still track smoothly, but hits get a little more snap behind them, while the crowd’s truncated animations call to mind the flat images used to animate crowds in early 3D games.

Outside the usual modes there isn’t much, with the titular Tennis Blast only allowing for two variations, one which occasionally changes the bounds of the court, and another that has sections of the net increase in height, requiring you to hit the ball higher or avoid certain sections. They play well to the game’s precision shot mechanics, though they’re a far cry from the wild variations of the genre, or even some of the sillier mini-games in the Virtua Tennis games.

Super Tennis Blast is competent–it’s well made, polished, and looks good, but it doesn’t do much to stand out. It doesn’t have the powerful feedback or outlandish charm that its peers do. Its wealth of shot options gives you a lot of ways to approach a situation, but complicates the controls and cuts into the pick up and play appeal of competitive tennis.

Despite that, it’s one of the better contemporary tennis titles–at least on Switch–and would be easy to recommend if not for a small, inconsistent stuttering in versus mode. Performance was otherwise smooth, so I’m not sure where the issue lies. Hopefully a patch can bring it where it needs to be, but until then this tennis is a little less super than its name implies.