AO Tennis 2 Review – Too Many Unforced Errors

Publisher: Bigben Interactive

Developer: Big Ant Studios

Rating: Everyone

Reviewed on: Xbox One

Also on: PlayStation 4, Switch, PC

Flow is important in tennis, but it’s hard to get in the groove in AO Tennis 2. Rough spots in the gameplay, including wonky animations and that dreaded feeling that some outcomes are pre-determined, undermine a game that nevertheless includes an admirable career mode. It’s not a loss in straight sets, but it’s a defeat nevertheless.

Players’ movements don’t always synch up with expected shot animations, which can produce some surprising outcomes. You and your opponents can seemingly teleport a short distance to all of a sudden make a shot – an issue that is even more egregious online. Players also give up unexpectedly on balls that look like they can be chased down. Perhaps this phenomenon influences the title’s high number of outright winners, where a player hits a clean, unreturnable shot. When these occur due to strategic rallies and/or a well-hit and placed shot, that’s great. However, too many times these happen seemingly out of thin air.

Movement is a problem when it comes to changing direction. Whether you have the movement assist on or off, your player is occasionally unresponsive. In tennis you must keep moving to prevent from being caught flat footed, yet the game isn’t always up to the task. I don’t expect to be able to joystick around the court unabated, but it’s disappointing when you anticipate your opponent’s shot correctly and still aren’t able to make a play on the ball because the game is not responding to your input. 

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AO Tennis 2’s gameplay has redeeming qualities when it’s not working against you. Points can be saved or won by choosing the right shot type at the right moment. Slice shots take less time to execute, providing a way out when you’re rushed, and the key to winning points is often to push for precise shots. Shot depth, placement along lines, taking a chance with a more aggressive shot, and getting the correct shot timing can make a big difference. Setting up your opponent with your shots before putting them away is also important, and I needed different strategies when one approach wasn’t getting it done (even though the drop shot is overpowered).

Raising player attributes like speed, stamina, and ability to hit certain shot types are integral as you play harder opponents and play on higher difficulties. This dovetails nicely into the career mode, which is the game’s highlight. The mode’s task of balancing a weekly tournament schedule with rest and training sessions isn’t unique, but I like how cleanly the pieces fit together.

It’s important not to get behind the fatigue eight ball, lest it lower your stats as you get further into a tournament, affecting your abilities just when you need them most. Careful planning and rest keep fatigue in check, but so does paying for a retinue of support services, including a coach, physiotherapist, sports scientist, photographer, and more. These positions help keep you in tip-top shape, reduce the effects of traveling to tournaments, and boost the effects of training. These aren’t simply one-and-done upgrades, however, as money from tournaments and sponsors fuel these annual expenses. The fact that your money also raises your attributes keeps you on the tour’s treadmill, striving for that next rung up the ladder.

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Real-world sponsors such as Uber, Lacoste, and Häagen-Dazs give the mode a fun boost, and developer Big Ant takes this a step further with its creation and import tools. These let you bolster the existing licensed player pool, add replicas of real-life stadiums, and create your own sponsor logos. The community has already taken up the charge, creating real-world player lists you can import to bolster your career experience. You can even take these online, but unfortunately that mode consists only of quick match and create a match, with no matchmaking or larger structure apart from a leaderboard.

Despite the strength of its career mode, it’s too bad AO Tennis 2’s gameplay isn’t more dependable, because the genre has needed a new light for several generations. However, this game can’t muster the consistency needed to be a credible threat.

Score: 6.5

Summary: Developer Big Ant keeps improving the series' career mode, but the gameplay is what really needs the work.

Concept: AO Tennis 2 builds off the improvements in 2018’s AO Tennis International rather than actually being a direct sequel to the first AO Tennis, which also came out in 2018

Graphics: Player faces are decent likenesses, if emotionless

Sound: There are no match commentators, but at least the chair umpire reads the score in French where appropriate

Playability: The sometimes-unpredictable animations and unresponsive controls can be frustrating

Entertainment: The career mode and creation tools are the best parts of AO Tennis 2, but the gameplay struggles to keep up its end of the bargain

Replay: Moderately High

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Legends of Runeterra Review - Colorful Card Combat

Publisher: Riot Games

Developer: Riot Games

Reviewed on: PC

Also on: iOS, Android

The free-to-play digital card game space is a constant battle for discovery and long-term viability. With Legends of Runeterra, Riot is entering a battlefield filled with numerous competitors. An amalgamation of parts constructed from bits of Magic: The Gathering, Hearthstone, Gwent, and even Valve’s Artifact, it’s a carefully constructed recipe bursting with League of Legends flavor and personality.

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If you already love League of Legends, you can find a lot to enjoy here, but that familiarity is not a requirement. Champions from League form the backbone of many decks, and Riot has done an excellent job translating the spirit of the characters into card form. The hyper-annoying Teemo, long-known for hit-and-run tactics and mushroom traps in League of Legends, becomes a stealthy and equally annoying treasure in Runeterra, infesting your opponent’s deck with a deadly stream of poisonous mushrooms that function as a lethal clock. Heimerdinger’s turret-spawning antics can take a blank board to one overflowing with dangerous machinations. Tryndamere commands the late-game with overflowing strength and barbarian tenacity. Ashe’s signature frozen arrows turn even the mightiest army into a frigid, meek menagerie. Like their League of Legends counterparts, playing with the different champions often changes the rules, and you really feel like you’re playing a different game each time as you build around their strengths. This lends a good deal of variety to the same base goal of reducing a life total to zero.

These champions all feature level-up requirements that you can build a deck around, which makes it easy to identify strategies to cobble together archetypes. For instance, Teemo starts off by popping five mushrooms into the opponent’s deck if he hits them. But after 15 mushrooms have been placed, Teemo levels up, causing his taps to double the mushrooms in the opponent’s deck on a successful connect – making a connection a dire, game-winning pop instead of a couple of shroomies you can ignore.

Outside of the cool quips and animations that occur during these champion level-ups, the core of the strategy lies in two major elements: synergy and timing. You’re encouraged to build decks that use up to two factions, based on locations from the League of Legends universe. You can easily build a focused deck from one faction that does something well, but grabbing cards from a second faction can cover your blind spots and make something more effective. If you’re making a Frejlord deck focused on huge followers and buffs, you may want to add some Shadow Isles cards to give you some removal potential to take out enemy threats.

On the surface, one could mistake things as a simple game of “playing cards on curve” as your mana goes up, but the element of passing rounds and actions makes timing a much more interesting proposition. When you do something can be more important than the action itself. If it’s your turn to attack, do you do it right away when the opponent hasn’t had time to put something large on the board to block, or do you wait until after you’ve played something huge of your own? If you try playing a big, game-ending beastie at the start of your turn, you could be walking right into an opponent’s trap; maybe they can blow up the entire battlefield with a spell and cause you to lose everything. On the other hand, if you attack right away, you could be leaving a ton of extra damage on the table, making your turn far less effective. Knowing and guessing what your opponent might play at any given time is a huge factor that can make or break games. Chains of spells, actions, and reactions to any given situation form extremely satisfying interactions that let you flex your brain instead of simply dumping something new on the board each round.

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Currently, your activities are rather limited, whether you’re climbing the ladder in standard matches or engaging with the draft format, Expedition. Expedition lacks the variety other card games offer, as it essentially has you building around archetypes from small, constructed card pods instead of having a wide field to select from. However, this mode is incredibly accessible for novices and newcomers. Standard matches are fast and fun, but you end up facing off against many of the same archetypes over and over. A.I. matches are available, but there’s no real single-player content to speak of or any engagement outside of the two core offerings.

This is a free-to-play game, with a catch. In a strange twist, how many cards players can purchase per week is limited (in addition to your standard free progression). That means it’s likely no one has every card, and the best strategies have not yet been codified. This keeps the metagame fresh and full of experimentation, since you have to use what you have without cobbling together all the best decks immediately. However, it remains to be seen whether this approach will give new arrivals an inherent disadvantage in the future.

Legends of Runeterra has a lot to offer as it enters the digital card game ring. Exploring the League of Legends universe in card form is enjoyable and addictive, and slicing an opponent down with a Fiora flourish or a Thresh-hooked hero is a blast.

Score: 8.25

Summary: The League of Legends card game successfully translates a vibrant world.

Concept: Take on an opponent in fast-paced card matches with characters from the League of Legends universe

Graphics: Card art is great, and the level-up transitions and animations give a little extra oomph to a game that generally boils down to numbers

Sound: Voices add an essential bit of flavor to major and minor characters, with sturdy (if repetitive) sounds and score

Playability: Those who already are immersed in the world of digital card games will be familiar with most mechanics immediately

Entertainment: Cool animations, League of Legends flavor, and smart gameplay elements that reward strategy make Legends of Runeterra a solid addition to the genre

Replay: High

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7th Sector Review – A Puzzler With A Spark

Publisher: Sometimes You

Developer: Sergey Noskov

Rating: Teen

Reviewed on: Xbox One

Also on: PlayStation 4, PC

A television set comes to life, static filling its screen. Within the noise, you can barely make out a humanoid figure. Moving the analog stick makes this faint specter move, but it’s trapped in this small box with no clear objective or interaction point. This is 7th Sector’s first puzzle, and it’s a bit of a doozy, at first making me think my game may have glitched out. Developer Sergey Noskov gives you no indication of what you need to do in this moment. Almost every puzzle is free of guidance, which can lead to moments of frustration. But more often, it leads to the satisfaction of having the insight to figure something out on your own. This is a game that lives and dies by its obtuse design.

After the first puzzle is solved in a fairly unconventional way, 7th Sector only gets stranger. You don’t take control of the human you saw or anything even close to a typical game character. You become an ordinary electrical spark. It can’t emote or do anything other than travel along cables to devices that it can bring to life. As the spark moves through the world, you see a dystopian cyberpunk story unfold in the background, catching glimpses of robots warring with humans and even more distressing and fascinating things. This is a clever way of telling a story, but it doesn’t deliver much excitement or build up until the final act, which concludes with a great reveal in the vein of The Matrix.

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The spark of note is used effectively for clever navigational puzzles along a side-scrolling setting that push you to figure out how to reach other cables or to open doors. Just when it seems like the puzzles mostly revolve around figuring out patterns or using the correct timing, Noskov (who is a one-person development team) throws math at you. You are asked to solve fairly simple math problems, like figuring out which group of numbers adds up to 220 (a specific number used often in 7th Sector), but you are also presented with division and multiplication tests. If a math problem is too hard, you can randomly click numbers to brute-force the solution without negative consequences (as I did once). That said, by the time the credits rolled, I looked back on the math and found it connected nicely to what Noskov is trying to reveal in the story. It’s quite clever.

Just as I was getting used to controlling my emotionless blue spark, the gameplay changes completely to power up a robotic ball, which you then control. Outside of more math, the puzzles become entirely different at this point, yet just as fun and directionless, only now involving more physics-based actions. Just when it seemed I had the ball gameplay down, the spark jumps into another robot. This one is much bigger and has guns, which leads to some combat amidst even more puzzles. The combat isn’t great, and is easily the weakest part of the game, but it is used sparingly and is only mildly frustrating.

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The spark moves on to other entities as well, but it wouldn’t be fair of me to spoil where this adventure goes next. In the three to four hours it took to complete 7th Sector, I was eager to see what would happen next, all while cursing math and not knowing what I needed to do. I got stumped a few times, but the puzzle spaces are small and most of their interactive elements are easy to spot.

I’m a big fan of Playdead’s Limbo and Inside, and 7th Sector scratches the same kind of itch, but in much stranger and mathematical ways. It’s a journey worth taking, but just know you’re often left directionless and perhaps in need of a calculator.

Score: 7.5

Summary: Robots, electricity, and math all come into play in this unique side-scrolling puzzle game.

Concept: A side-scrolling adventure that delivers little direction in its puzzles, yet makes you feel great when solving them

Graphics: The dark cyberpunk setting sells the mood, and the backdrops effectively tell the story

Sound: The score is appropriately empty and eerie. Sound is sometimes used to help guide you through puzzles

Playability: Outside of having to solve math problems, many of the puzzles are clever one-offs, meaning you almost always have new challenges to look forward to

Entertainment: The story delivers a nice payoff at the end, making the difficult puzzles worth the time

Replay: Moderately Low

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