Real Tennis HD

Publisher: Gameloft.
Price: £2.99 (buy now)
Version reviewed: iPad, by nofi.

Real Tennis HD’s biggest problem isn’t the lack of licensed players, or real courts to take away that ‘real’ moniker – no, it’s the frankly abysmal frame rate which is so poor it actually affects the gameplay, something rarely seen on the iPad. In taking the framework of the game from last year’s Real Tennis 2009, Gameloft’s upscaled remix might look nice and sharp in stills, but in motion it’s got some real hurdles that need to be overcome before we can recommend it.

How bad is it? Well, it’s bad enough to frequent miss the frames where you actually hit the ball, for example, and it’s bad enough to make the animation look jerky as you move from one side of the court to the other. And yes, it’s bad enough to give you a headache after repeated play, which is a shame because Real Tennis HD is actually a good game of tennis, but it’s hidden so deeply under graphics that really need refining that it’s not easy to be convinced at first.

The controls, too, need some attention – the idea of tilting the iPad to control the location of the serve is both pointless and wholy inaccurate, the target wobbling all over despite a careful poise – especially disheartening when there’s a perfectly reasonable d-pad perched towards the bottom left of the screen anyway. A game so keen to ape genre staples like Virtua Tennis with the visuals would do well to follow their lead with the basic gameplay mechanics too.

And whilst the on-screen d-pad works well enough during a match, there’s no reason why Gameloft wouldn’t have offered the ability to simply tap where you’d like your player to run to, and likewise the confusing arrays of lobs, slices and dropshots would have been better handled with an extra button rather than trying to cram far too many types of shot onto one small icon. A hangover from the iPhone version perhaps, but an odd one.

Other issues? The shadows are nasty, apparently consisting of about seven low resolution, blurry pixels; the game can actually ‘lose’ the shot button (a quick test of the Doubles mode found it hidden off-screen towards the top left and required a reset before it could be used in game) and the crowd’s completely static, which is slightly offputting.

However, all that aside, Real Tennis HD actually tries to offer a decent game of tennis. The opponents are reasonably smart (although don’t waste your time on the ‘Junior’ setting) and throughout the Championship and Tournament modes there’s plenty of challenge. The presentation’s fine too, graphics aside, load times are quick, the cut-scenes are nicely animated and frequent and the TV-style presentation is welcome. There’s also local multiplayer over wi-fi.

If Gameloft can get that framerate up and fix the bugs this could be a contender, but as it stands there’re just too many things that need updating.