Standard sporting action
The tennis market is one which is pretty well supplied with games, with everything from the likes of Virtua Tennis, World Tennis Championships and Nintendo's classic Super Tennis being widely available, so you have to question the need for another similar game. And in the case of Tennis Elbow, you'd be right to do so. There's nothing particularly wrong with it, it's just that in an over-crowded genre, you have to provide something a bit special to get the attention of fans and unfortunately, this one just doesn't offer anything we haven't seen before. In its favour, Tennis Elbow does have a nicely extensive range of options available, including all the expected court types, singles and doubles matches (which can be mixed up so that you actually play two-on-one) and a full World Tour where you face off against 250 players. You've also got a decent action replay mode, allowing you to re-live all your glory (and glorious failures) again and again to your heart's content, while there is a good selection of shots to be made and which are achieved through a straightforward control system. As tennis games go, this is decent enough stuff. The visuals are solid, if unspectacular, with good-sized sprites but which suffer from stiff animation, while sound is the usual mix of crowd noises and bouncing balls, but which are strangely exaggerated and which give the game an unintentionally comic mood at times. Gameplay- wise it's all standard stuff really but it lacks the elegance of something like Pete Sampras Tennis and you can't help feeling that you've seen it all before only better. Unless you're a die-hard tennis fan who has to play every game on the market, you can probably skip this in favour of something better.
