With Wimbledon now done, dusted and consigned to the history books for yet another year, it’s fair to say that most of us have probably watched our last slice of telly tennis until SW19 welcomes the crowds back next June. An English tradition much in the way of bangers and mash, bad weather and eternal disappointment, watching the world’s greatest grass court championship unfold with the soothing tones of Sue Barker for a couple of weeks is actually really good fun, and as a result the release of Top Spin 3 could not have been better timed.

It’s all been a bit quiet on the tennis front since Virtua Tennis 3 excellently sliced and lobbed its way to the top of the charts early last year, with only SEGA Superstar Tennis trying – and mostly failing – to stop us from playing Wii Sports tennis in the interim. Top Spin 3, loaded with real tennis stars, modes and rather swanky graphics, aims to send a fizzing cross-court volley past all of them and ends up succeeding really rather nicely indeed.

It won’t feel like this is the case initially, however, as most of your first few hours with Top Spin 3 will most likely be spent seeing opponents’ shots fly past you left, right and centre whilst you stand their vaguely flailing your racquet in some buffoonish attempt to return it. It feels remarkably similar to actually going to the local sports centre and accidentally agreeing to have a warm up set with the local village pro, and as such you’re going to have to spend a bit of time learning the ropes before you even touch the game’s career mode or anything like it.

The general gist of TS3’s control scheme is that you have to position yourself well in advance of each return, hold down the requisite button for whatever type of effort you want to fire back and then let go of it at the right time alongside a deft flick of direction to have your player perform the shot. It takes a little getting used to (especially if you are like me and return to SNES button-tapper Super Tennis every now and again), but the key thing is that after a while you absorb it nicely and start managing to pull off all kinds of tricks. It’s not the easiest to pick up, sure, but boy is it rewarding.

Fans of the series will no doubt also be used to the concept of pulling trigger buttons to perform riskier shots, and once more they’ve been giving this option should they wish with the left trigger increasing your accuracy and the right your power. Much in keeping with the more simulated nature of the game they do tend to fizz dramatically wide or rather hopelessly slap into the net initially, but a little practice goes a long way. They’re not the kinds of shots that you’re definitely going to have to use if you want to be the best, but for those wanting to tip the balance of a tense rally or fire a warning shot past your opponents bows they can be really rather effective.

Thus, playing Top Spin 3 soon becomes really rather rhythmic, with you realising that it’s not just a matter of how hard you hit a shot or at what angle you aim it, but more importantly where you’re standing and how you time things. Anticipation is the name of the game and it’s certainly something that you learn rather than pick up straight away, but once you’ve got used to the way in which the game works and can accept that you need to time pretty much anything very well then it all slots into place.

Of course, all of the various facets of the control system could become rather boggling should you be forced to go in at the deep end and start teaching yourself them during matches, so Top Spin School pops along to give us all a helping hand and hopefully give players a decent grounding in what makes a good Top Spin player. It certainly throws pretty much every area of tennis at you in the form of a whole raft of little tests, and as such helps smooth over what could have been a rather brutal initial difficulty spike.

That’s not to say that the tennis isn’t without its share of issues, mind. You’ll quickly become aware that a mere wrong twitch of direction at the wrong point in the rally will completely stuff you up, whilst there are times when your player will scuff or miss a shot when for all the world you thought you’d aced the timing. The other main problem that I found during my time is that playing the more subtle shots – drop shots, for example – are really rather more difficult to pull off than is reasonable, and more often than not you’ll see them drop disastrously short. It’s very unforgiving even at the best of times, and as such the lack of immediacy will also handicap any friends you might want to have a quick two-player match up with along the way.

That same learning curve actually works well with the single player side of the game though, with the career mode opening up into something genuinely enjoyable and tasking as you go along. Ignoring the possibility of another mini-game filled adventure, this time you start off as a player of your own creation with basic abilities and have to play your way through matches and tournaments, earning experience and cash to buy new equipment as you go along.

Starting with a trio of amateur matches on a small, secluded practice court and challenger games in what looks like an old coliseum, you are then promoted to junior and then Pro, with the latter two starting to give you more of a season progression whereby you can enter tournaments and really start to rack up the experience. Thing is, though, that as soon as you get to the junior point the whole thing ramps up the difficulty to a level where you will initially really, really struggle to get anywhere, with much better players punishing you for all your worth. It’s a bit of a shock; especially as the first two amateur and challenger sections are rather more easy.

The more you plug away, though, the better things will become. With a whole tonne of experience to spread around eight attribute points (but not enough to make you a master in all, interestingly) your player will soon start to dig their claws into your higher-ranked opponents and as a result you’ll begin to get further and further into the tournaments. The likes of Scottish grump Andy Murray and Roger Federer await the accomplished male superstar (and Rafa Nadal if you own the PS3 version to which he is exclusive), whilst those who prefer a bit of female action can eventually battle it out against Maria ‘Yes Please’ Sharapova and Justine ‘No Thanks’ Henin. There are no Williams sisters, mind, which is either good or bad depending on your particular whim, but it makes up for this by having legends such as Boris Becker and Bjorn Borg.

They all look startlingly realistic, too, with the game showcasing some very fluid movement and some rather spiffing texturing. That being said, anyone who has ever watched a tennis match either live or on telly will be aware that something Top Spin 3 doesn’t do nearly as well as it should is capture the atmosphere of the sport, with even high-ranked tournaments being watched by awfully polite folks who clap in all the right places and such. It’s a shame to take your swish female British player through to the semi finals at what is supposed to be Wimbledon (named something else due to licensing) and receive no special cheer or crowd support, and even the little heart monitor icon that shows your player getting excited or tired (with resulting reduction in shot accuracy) fails to really convey an impression of you actually being there.

Overall, the lack of real atmosphere kind of shoots TS3 in the foot a little, and as a result the whole thing falls into the Forza 2 bracket of being an otherwise excellent representation of a sport that lacks that little bit of zest to really hook you in to what you’re doing. The fact that the game is so difficult and offers such a sense of achievement when you do manage to reach the top is a bit of a painkiller for this issue, but a lot of cheering and a bit of glitz could have gone a long way to really smashing the sport out of your TV screen and into your face. Watching a tense five-setter in real life gets the hair on the back of your neck standing on end due to the roar, the yells and the screams as much as the tennis, and future tennis game developers might want to remember that.

The lack of mini games is also something that you’ll either love or hate; I personally think it doesn’t detract from the experience at all by not giving you the opportunity to smash little plates with forehands or such. Once you get into the career mode enough you become fully focused on progressing through and winning your matches, and as such it’s my personal opinion that breaking things up with small mini games for training would have broken the chain of thought too much. That said, giving players a practice court or something similar would have been a good move, but it doesn’t so that’s your lot.

Still, multiplayer fun can make up for what the single player effort lacks in atmosphere, and as you’d expect you can pretty much do anything; one-on-one, co-operative or oppositional doubles etc as far as local play goes. You can also head online to the rather robust Xbox Live side of things to take part in matches or fortnightly tournaments. Most matches that I played were smooth as a peach, but on some occasions the game did slip a little into some lag and as a result made timing some shots rather difficult.

Other than an exhibition mode for you to have one-off matches against pretty much anyone you like (Borg against Henin, anyone?) the only other real feature of note is the superb create-a-player mode in which you can create pretty much any horrific freak or page-three stunner you want. This is made all the more mouldable by allowing the player to pick certain points on your custom player’s face and move them around, hence completely changing their facial bone structure. With a bit of tinkering here and there you could theoretically make pretty much anything you want, so it’s pretty nifty.

Summing up Top Spin 3 as a tennis sim rather than a tennis game would be rather easy, hence I am going to do it. It’s the Skate to Virtua Tennis’ Tony Hawks; the rFactor to Virtua Tennis’ Project Gotham. It’s rather soulless to a degree and that does hurt the enjoyment, but dig deep and invest a wad of your time and you’ll eventually get closer to the fantastically rewarding heart beating beneath the rather cold, stark surface.