Cute wobbly avatars with no arms or legs—where have Wii seen this before?
If you're hoping for the second coming of Wii Tennis on your iPhone, you may want to take a bye on Tennis Slam. While this simple arcade tennis game borrows heavily from Nintendo's smash hit, it manages to replicate only the cutesy Mii art style and none of the gameplay.
Tennis Slam serves up the same basic mechanics across single-set, three-set, and five-set matches. As in Wii Tennis, the computer handles the positioning of both teams' Weebl-like avatars, leaving the player to serve and return by either tapping the screen or flicking the iPhone. You can execute powerful serves by tapping once to start your serve then again where the racket and ball meet for an ace that often baffles your AI opponent. Once you've mastered this mechanic, however, you've essentially figured out the game, and winning matches becomes trivial. With no multiplayer support, you'll quickly tire of the easily fooled AI.
The game's physics are also rather simplistic, with no real way to control the ball's often predictable trajectory, so you're essentially just tapping the screen in time to keep up a volley. Rally long enough and you'll eventually beat your high scores as the game rewards you for each return, a fundamental departure from the object of real tennis, which is, you know, winning. Even worse, Tennis Slam feels unpolished considering there's absolutely no sound, neither music nor effects, which is fine if the developer's intent was to create an idle game to busy your thumbs during an iTunes playlist. But, considering that running iTunes significantly hampers the framerate, we're more inclined to attribute the game's silence to lack of time and resources.
At five bucks, Tennis Slam is an overpriced double-fault. If you're itching for some 3D tennis action you may be waiting on the sidelines for more apps, but if it's music-supported idle tapping you're after, Tap Tap Revenge wins in straight sets.
Call us when this one drops below the price of an iTunes track.
Cute graphics. Both motion and tap controls.
No sound. Slowdown when playing iPod music. Lack of game modes. Simplistic physics.
