Grand Slam Tennis 2 PlayStation 3
User Score
4.7 out of 10

Generally unfavorable reviews- based on 12 Ratings

User score distribution:
  1. Positive: 5 out of 12
  2. Mixed: 1 out of 12
  3. Negative: 6 out of 12

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  1. Brak
    Sep 5, 2012
    3
    This game has some really entertaining game play/mechanics, looking at it strictly from the standpoint of what you do when you're in a match. The controls strike a good balance between simplicity and sophistication.* The commentary is entertaining, if a little repetitive over time. It can be fun to play.

    And that's where my positives end, because for whatever time EA Sports spent in     game mechanics, they seemingly spent no time whatsoever in the orchestration of the user experience across the different modes and usage patterns. Here are some examples of how the user experience off the court completely falls down.

    The navigation through screens, modes, transitions, etc., is quite simply the worst and most unintuitive I've used in a game in as long as I can remember. Navigation options are often incredibly difficult to decipher, based on their descriptions (i.e. "Okay, so what to I click on now?"), and most of the time, once you do figure them out, don't make any real sense at all from an intuitiveness standpoint. And the accompanying help screens? EA, you may as well have just written "TODO" on each page of documentation, for all of the lack of value of the sparse information presented. Simply awful, not production quality at all. Somebody-should-be-fired awful. It took quite a while of playing and navigating, with trial and error, to figure out what you should and shouldn't do.

    The career mode is unbelievably unrealistic and decidedly unrewarding. The first two years of your career are a total cakewalk. I lost one match in the entire 24 months of play. Then I stepped into the first match of the third year, and couldn't take more than a game from the lowest chump on the ladder. There's a complete disconnect and inconsistency in CPU player experience, from match to match.

    What's more, there's nothing particularly rewarding about winning. You collect these "yearly" and "career-long" goal accomplishments that translate into "points", but the points have absolutely no bearing on how well your follow-up skills and games are going to progress. They may occasionally coincide with an enhanced racket or some attribute points, but then again you're never clear in the beginning about whether you should even play the exhibition matches (which are the only ones to yield these improvements), since it's an either/or proposition to playing in the tournament going on at the same time (the either/or proposition is something you have to find out by trial and error). And at first glance it looks like you're on a yearly quest to achieve some laundry list of win objectives that conflict with other goals, only to figure out later that all of those objectives just carry over into the next year after year anyway, if you didn't complete them in the year specified. What?

    The worst part about this player feedback/improvement system, to me, is the fact that you don't develop better skills by virtue of playing (and winning). You can only up-level your skills by "training", or winning "special" (exhibition) matches. It's completely divorced from reality, which to me isn't a good quality in a reality simulator. What's also totally unrealistic, with respect to following real tennis as a fan, is that your "rank" improvements are entirely tied to this independent point-gathering system, which has nothing to do with the players you're playing (only the position in the tournament at which you face them). The end result is that, after two years and 8 Grand Slam wins in a row, I end up ranked 25th. What? And in the end, who cares? Because none of the players you play against have any meaningful ranking at all, let alone a ranking that measures against your own. What? The point system is entirely meaningless.

    This game has production-quality mechanics. The rest of it, from story to navigation to incentives, is quite simply an afterthought, and in no way resembles a production-quality experience. If you care about the progression of your games, as opposed to simply playing to play, this game is not going to be for you, by a wide margin.

    *Postscript: I found the Playstation Move controls to be unusable on this game. If you're looking for a great physically active PS Move game, this isn't the game for you.    … Expand
  2. jeffl910
    Feb 27, 2012
    10
    Best tennis game out at this time. I dont like to go through character attribute points or training, I want to play tennis and I want it to be fun. Grand slam tennis give me all of that, its graphics are much improved over the last one, gameplay is fast and its just fun! Works great with the PS3 Move!

    The other tennis games seem slow to me, and I get board. Also, the PS3 move controls     on both virtua tennis 4 and topspin 4 are horrible which gives Grand Slam the advantage. Online play is really fun as well. Overall, its a simple game for those who want to get in and play some matches, maybe online or not, then get on with your day. It isnt necessarily for those who want to develop a character and build their attributes like a role playing game.… Collapse
  3. Madmaz
    Feb 14, 2012
    3
    Dont buy this game..Get Top Spin 4 or Virtual Tennis 4..on the surface of it it looks like a good game..lots of real players , all 4 grand slam events, the ability to create your own player complete with game face. But the heart of the game the Career is awful. Compared to Top Spin 4 its severely lacking , not half as many smaller tournaments of competitions to enter and Top Spin 4' s player progression is much more advanced than this. Ok you might say thats ok I can live with that, and I agree but the one thing which absolutely kilss this game is they way they have done the Ai difficulty in the career. Instead of you choosing what lever you'd like to play on ie easy, normal, hard, they have done so you start your career on the easy level for 2/3 seasons then it goes up to normal then after a few more seasons it goes up again, so you end up on legendary difficulty in the final part of your career which means that in the first year you can WIN ALL THE GRAND SLAMS COZ THE AI IS ON EASY!!...hello??..where is the logic in that!?..so you dont really bother after that!..the game play itself is ok , but its on rails ..impossible to put the ball out....Poor effort by EA..the demo sold me this game, but the final product is rubbish..avoid at all costs. Get Top Spin 4 for a tennis game that will keep you coming back.… Expand

Critic Reviews

All reviews »
Metascore
73 out of 100

Mixed or average reviews - based on 36 Critics

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 18 out of 36
  2. Mixed: 18 out of 36
  3. Negative: 0 out of 36
  1. Worth Playing
    Nov 12, 2012
    90
    Grand Slam Tennis 2 is worth picking up, and the fact that the online portion of the game is still active certainly makes for an appeasing purchase.
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  2. Armchair Empire
    Jun 18, 2012
    70
    GST2 is a solid effort, but falls short in several areas. The career mode, opponent AI and presentation still need to be fine tuned. If EA can sort out these issues then there's no doubt GST3 could be the new Grand Slam Champion of tennis.
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  3. Gamers' Temple
    Mar 29, 2012
    76
    All things considered, if you enjoy the sport or even if you just enjoy challenging yourself with new games that are Move compatible, I'd say this one is worth picking up.
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