Hands-on: Top Spin 2K25 looks set to serve up some real quality

For a sport that’s popular worldwide, it’s surprising that there aren’t more tennis video games these days.

In the ‘90s and 2000s there was a decent variety of tennis games to choose from, ranging from the Virtua Tennis series, to EA’s Grand Slam Tennis games, to Namco’s Smash Court Tennis franchise, to more comical fare like Sega Superstars Tennis and Mario Power Tennis.

These days the offerings are a little more sparse. Mario’s still on the scene with Mario Tennis Aces, but in terms of more serious titles you’ve got Nacon’s AO Tennis series (which is getting a sequel, Tiebreak, later this year) and Bigben Interactive’s Tennis World Tour, neither of which were met with much critical enthusiasm.

Things may be about to change, however, with 2K’s decision to revive a series that has been lying dormant for 13 years. Top Spin is back for the first time since the PS3 and Xbox 360 era, and from what I’ve played of it this could be the modern tennis game fans of the sport have been looking for.

Set for release on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PS4, Xbox One and Steam, TopSpin 2K25 is the fifth game in the series and the last since 2011’s Top Spin 4. What’s more, 2K has been quietly beavering away on it in the shadows, meaning tennis devotees will only have to wait a month and a half for it, given its April 26 release date.

I travelled to Paris to go hands-on with the game’s TopSpin Academy and Exhibition modes for a few hours, and came away happy – this one has the potential to be an impressive package if the rest of its modes (especially its career mode) provide enough longevity.

The TopSpin Academy mode serves as the game’s tutorial, and is narrated by John McEnroe. Let’s just say that for a guy who was famous for his voice, he probably shouldn’t quit his day job as a commentator or consider doing voice acting full time, but he serves his purpose here and having a big name adds some credibility to a series younger tennis fans may not be so familiar with.

The swinging mechanic in Top Spin 2K25 involves positioning your player, holding your stroke button of choice and letting go when it reaches the green point of a meter that appears above your head.

Releasing when it’s green gives you a perfect shot but it’s not essential: failing to hit the green will simply reduce the level of power and accuracy. You might not hit those perfect shots that bounce neatly onto the baseline or sidelines, but it’ll usually at least stay in the court and might still be enough to score a point depending on the circumstances.

After the Academy it was onto a series of Exhibition matches. The build I played featured ten players (with more obviously set to be announced nearer release), neatly split into five retired legends and five current stars.

The legends on offer to us were Serena Williams, Roger Federer, Andre Agassi, John McEnroe and Steffi Graf, while the current players were Emma Raducanu, Coco Gauff, Frances Tiafoe, Iga Świątek and Carlos Alcaraz. Each player looks impressive in-game, especially those whose faces were scanned (this obviously wasn’t possible for some of the older legends, but cover stars Williams and Federer are exceptions).

The game also features 48 courts, 15 of which are based on real-life venues. We were able to try five of these – the Australian Open at the Rod Laver Arena, the Roland Garros French Open at the Court Philippe Chatrier, the US Open at Arthur Ashe Stadium, the BNP Paribas Open at Indian Wells and Centre Court at Wimbledon.

I particularly liked the attention to detail shown, from the umpires reading the scores in the language befitting the location, to the court-specific rules. For example, each character has numerous outfits, but when you play at Wimbledon you can only wear white, as per the venue’s real-life rules.

I noted this to the game’s lead technical artist Geert De Cnodder. “There are some things like that,” he replied, “and our licensing team helps us to identify those and make sure that we get them right.

“It’s a lot of hard work to get all these little details right, but I think the team aced it, and I think the licensing partners are happy with the results as well.”

Rather than ask whether he meant a tennis pun when he said “aced”, I asked De Cnodder how he would describe Top Spin 2K25’s gameplay. Most tennis games seem to favour either arcade-style gameplay or a more realistic simulation of the sport, but Top Spin seems to fit somewhere in the middle, albeit with more of a leaning towards the latter.

This is no pick-up-and-play game like Mario Tennis or even Virtua Tennis. It took me about 45 minutes to get used to the game’s swing mechanics and I have no doubt there’s plenty more to get out of it. I didn’t even get a chance to look at the different play styles each player has and how it affects their swings and positioning.

“This is no pick-up-and-play game like Mario Tennis or even Virtua Tennis. It took me about 45 minutes to get used to the game’s swing mechanics and I have no doubt there’s plenty more to get out of it.”

Yet despite this, the focus on realism wasn’t a complete barrier, and by the end of our play session there was copious whooping and yelling as I played co-op doubles and competitive matches with other attendees.

“I think it’s still simulation-based,” De Cnodder said, “but we make it accessible to people.

“I think that’s always what Top Spin has been, and I feel like a lot of people also compare a lot of other games to what Top Spin was. So they’ll say ‘it’s more arcadey, or more simulation, compared to Top Spin’.

“But we just used the Top Spin aesthetics and gameplay, we used those to our advantage, and wanted to just give a very authentic product again to people.”

I was less convinced that “advantage” was a deliberate pun this time, so instead tried to find out more about the game’s career mode. Given that it already looks like the actual gameplay on the court will at least be up to a decent standard, it remains to be seen whether there will be a lengthy career mode – or even a story mode like those seen in the NBA 2K and WWE 2K games – to maintain the interest of players who don’t want to play online.

De Cnodder was as predictably tight-lipped as anyone briefed by 2K would be, but he did at least throw us one tidbit of info which suggests there’ll be some sort of longevity here.

“You’ll see the changes when you go up [through the rankings], you’ll see how all the venues change with your celebrity status,” he explained to me.

“So when you start the career, some venues will be empty, because who wants to see number two-thousand-and-whatever in the world? But the further you go into a tournament or the further you go in your career, the more the stadiums will be filled.”

Naturally, there will be some who saw that this is a 2K game and immediately got worried about microtransactions. A sport like tennis initially seems like it might be harder to monetise, certainly not to the extent of something like MyTeam mode in the NBA 2K games, which are essentially 2K’s equivalent of EA FC’s Ultimate Team.

However, the news that there will be Deluxe and Grand Slam Editions with exclusive alternate outfits, racquets, serve types shows that there are still areas where new content can be added. What’s more, the fact that the Grand Slam Edition comes with “six post-launch Premium Centre Court Pass Seasons” suggests this content will continue long after the game’s release.

“There is some live content, but we can’t say much more about that,” an unsurprisingly unforthcoming De Cnodder told me. “There’ll be announcements about those things soon.”

After failing to sniff out even a hint of a pun in that last answer, it was clear to me that my time with the game was at an end. So far, so good, however, and it’s refreshing to have a game announcement so close to release, meaning before we know it we’ll be looking at the finished version in late April.

From what I’ve seen of it, Top Spin 2K25 is a game that will take a little getting used to, but thankfully not too much. By the end of my three-hour session I was engaging in lengthy rallies with the game’s Hard difficulty level, which you can see in the video near the top of this article (or on our YouTube channel, if you can’t be bothered scrolling). I was also reliably informed that there will be harder difficulty levels than this.

We’ll have a full review of Top Spin 2K25 next month, but so far this looks set (pun intended) to give tennis players the top quality, serious sim they’ve been craving for the past decade.