In the world of High Definition gaming, incredibly polished visuals and frightening realism are a necessity, and Top Spin 4 delivers to good effect. Developers, 2K Sports, have reworked the animation to keep up to date with its competitors, making sure every blade of grass is perfectly trim and every pixel on your TV is pulling its weight.

The new TV Broadcast and Presentation is a nice touch but one of the more important advances is the improvement of character style. Each player has been given their own personal touches, which makes the game ever more life-like. Signature swings and unique player movements make it far more satisfying to watch and with the deepest player roster ever, each match in the career mode and tournament mode is different from the next. A little added spice is the merging of old and new players, so you can stop arguing with your dad over whether or not Sampras was better than Federer. You can pick up a controller and take to the court yourselves.

But this is perhaps where Top Spin 4 is lagging – gameplay. Controls are simple and they haven’t seemed to have evolved even since the age of the original 1994 console. Assigning the swing types to the 4 standard buttons seems prehistoric and doesn’t allow for much variation. Pressing the ‘square’ button will produce the same slice shot every time, albeit a little harder or softer depending on how long you hold it in for. As you can imagine, this becomes mundane pretty quickly and means that as soon as you master the timing, you essentially master the game. 2K Sports are in desperate need of some creativity to revamp the gaming experience but it seems obvious to me: The right analog stick is completely neglected! Other sports games have made this the basis of the gaming experience and it could offer so much more freedom to the gamer’s experience.

However, there is a solution to this in the short-term, so long as you own a Playstation Move. As you can imagine, this game flourishes when you have a virtual racket in your hand, as does every other Tennis, Golf or Baseball title. The visuals can make a game look real but what really brings it to life is your involvement with it. So when you play along with the Move in hand, you really do get the whole package.