I really, really need to stay off the pies and beer. Might be a strange statement to start off a review with, but if my time with the Wii’s Grand Slam Tennis is anything to go by then my diet and fitness regimes need a bloody great kick up the arse pretty quickly. As much fun as it was, and as much fun as playing a tennis game during Wimbledon fortnight seems, turning into a sweltering mass of knackered bone and tissue after a few matches was rather awkward.

This happened quite frequently during my week-or-so with the game, which I suppose is a good enough indication that I thought it was pretty good stuff indeed. Making full use of the Wii-mote’s MotionPlus pack, the game does a solid job at giving you the feeling that you do have a lot of control over shot direction and spin. It’s also pretty bloody tricky to get the hang of initially, but once you get over the method needed you find yourself really absorbing yourself into the action.

More on this later, but for now a cursory explanation of how EA’s brand of tennis goes about working. There are two control schemes on offer, one of which allows you to just use the Wii-mote and let the game attempt to put your player in the correct positions (which is does a pretty reasonable job at), or plug in a Nunchuck so you can do that yourself. The latter is recommended for sense of involvement, although initially you’ll find yourself getting into all sorts of awkward knots trying to perform shots. (Ooh, rhyming!).

The shot placement itself feels pleasingly natural, with earlier swings adding more angle onto cross-court efforts and later, timed swings sending one down the line should you feel the need. It’s not one-hundred percent nailed-on accurate of course and at times your player will play a shot you feel you weren’t aiming for, but subsequent analysis of replays tends to indicate that most of the time this is due to you not being in the right position, or not having swung at the correct moment. A good sign that this is the case is that the more you play, the less prevalent these concerns become as you learn the ropes.

Something perhaps not quite as good is the reliance on the A and B buttons to perform lob and drop shots. In the heat of the moment it’s often easy to get confused between which button performs which shot, and surely a lob gesture would have been easy enough to implement. You are also given the option of playing without MotionPlus if you are curious enough to see what difference the thing makes, although as soon as you realise that the answer is ‘a heck of a lot’ when the standard control turns the thing into a frustratingly imprecise test of patience you are more than likely to swap back.

In any case, the game throws a couple of options at you so you can climb the ranks from hashing around hopelessly like latter-day Henman to confidently pinging things about at silly angles like modern-day Murray. Confusingly, one thing the game doesn’t do is offer you a proper training mode to get to grips with things; instead, you have to make do with being presented a with a ball machine and being left to work things out for yourself from natural instinct and a selection of loading menu screens.

Once you reckon you’re sorted, the major offering is the career mode. Sadly this proves to be a somewhat shallow experience; you create your own player from a fairly limited set of pieces and go off on your travels around the four major tennis tournaments and… well, that’s it. There’s a pretty shallow form of progression in that before each tournament you can partake in a couple of practice and training style matches to improve your stats and unlock new equipment, but that’s about your lot. It certainly lacks the immersive nature of something like Top Spin in which you start off scratching around in lower tournaments and have to build yourself up to bigger and better things.

Other offerings include the obvious single match in singles or double format and a selection of party games, such as having to win the point using lobs and drops to score double points and having time-limited games in which the person with the most points after a certain time will win. You could argue that again these aren’t exactly thrilling or that addictive, yet the sheer fun of blatting around playing tennis goes a long way to making up for it.

As this is the case multiplayer fun is all the more enjoyable, as you’d probably expect. Sure, you will need to shell out £20 on a MotionPlus if you fancy a bit of local multiplayer (always the best type, allowing for the fact that you will need a bit of space to both swing about in), but an added bonus is that the online portion of the game works beautifully and can have you in a match quickly and effortlessly. A slight annoyance is that if you wish to be ranked you have to sign up for an EA account, but online shenanigans are pleasingly lag-free and very enjoyable indeed. You can even hook up with a local doubles partner and head online for some online 4-player fun, so another big tick there.

Add all this into a curious (but fun) mixture of past and present tennis stars (Murray, Federer, Bjorg, McEnroe etc) all stylised in a colourful cartoon way and you can’t help but really enjoy what EA have served up. It’s not particularly deep and involving in terms of the career mode, granted, but the most important part of the package – the controls – work instinctively and are great fun to get to grips with, promising a great future for MotionPlus on the whole… just make sure you watch those light shades and nearby vases, okay?