Grand Slam Tennis is as slick and professional a tennis game as you could hope for, and though it lacks something of Top Spin's passion for the sport, the inclusion of Wimbledon and the wider roster really do make a difference.
Despite EA Sports leaving itself plenty of room for improvement in future iterations of Grand Slam Tennis, what's here is enjoyable. Perhaps a little too easy for tennis veterans, the experience of being out on court, thwacking the ball around is great fun. It's just the Career Mode that lets the game down.
Grand Slam Tennis 2 brings together a solid cast of real world champions and courts with dual analog controls and a balance between arcade physics and realism.
It's damn hard to talk about video game tennis without bringing up Virtua Tennis, particularly when a game, like Grand Slam Tennis 2, hems so close to that original arcade formula. It's a facsimile that's executed well enough; there just aren't any good reasons to recommend Grand Slam Tennis 2 over the games that it cribs from.
All the licensing in the world can't help you if the core gameplay is faulty, and in the case of Grand Slam Tennis 2 it just keeps serving double faults. The more you play it the less you find to like about it until eventually you just wish you hadn't started at all.