Rockstar delivers an extremely focused sports title that is the most true to life sports title out.
Upon your first impressions of Table Tennis, you probably are going to be feeling rather disappointed, as you may at first find that the game has an incredibly punishing learning curve and that the difficulty is far too harsh for beginners to play or even get used to the what appears to be a far to complex system. The thing about Table Tennis is that you need to tutor yourself of how to play the game, there is a fairly in depth tutorial mode that is present which teaches you how to do various shots, but to actually get anywhere with table tennis you need both time and practice. With practice under your belt you will soon get an appreciation of what Table Tennis has to offer and that is one of the most true to life sports games ever created thus far.
The gaming mechanics in Table Tennis are very simple yet very effective, you have four basic shot types, backspin, topspin, and both left and right sidespin, all mapped to the equivalent buttons on the Xbox 360 controller. The amount of strength that you want to apply to a shot is simply done by how long you hold the equivalent button in for, also the longer you hold the button down for also means the more spin and movement the ball will do both in the air and after hitting the table.
Also available are the soft shots, simply by holding in the bumpers whilst carefully tapping one of the face buttons on the 360 controller you will carefully place a soft shot just over the net, which can be very effective in long rallies and against players which like to hit the ball with pace as it can either catch your opponent out through them either hitting the ball out of the table or them not expecting the soft shot and simply hitting the ball in the air ready for you to pounce on by slamming it into the corners of there half.
One of the most interesting elements with gaming mechanics in Table Tennis is how you recognise the type of shot either you or your opponent has played. After hitting the ball it is followed by either a yellow, red, green or blue tracer indicated by the type of shot that has been played, this is a highly effective system as not only does it help you see how much spin your opponent has put onto the shot through the rotating arrow around the ball, but it helps you with your shot selection through knowing what shot best suits for couterspin. In the harder difficulties this is vital as playing the wrong kind of shot against a certain spin will leave you either hitting the ball into the net, off the table or simply knocking it into the air for your opponent to smash straight back at you.
Also available in your shot selection arsenal are the focus shots, after scoring a certain amount of points against your opponent, a focus metre will begin to accumulate, once this is filled up you hold down the right or left trigger whilst playing a shot, doing so the camera will cut to a close up of you playing the shot also incorporating slow motion. Doing so you will apply both a greater amount of pace and spin on the ball making the opponents shot that much more harder to return. You can also do combo shots that work simply by holding a combination of two different buttons creating a new kind of shot that are highly effective in long rallies as it makes couterspin that much more harder.
Rumble has been supported in Table Tennis and is quite possibly the best use of the feature in a game to date. The way in which the Rumble system works is simple yet effective just like all of the game mechanics in Table Tennis, basically as you aim your shot with the left analogue stick the closer you are to the edge of the table the more the rumble will grow, the more intense the rumble is the closer you are to the edge of the table. The rumble system both acts as a simple yet revolutionary touch to the gaming mechanics, which would be nice to see in tennis games of the future.
One of the games many standouts is its graphics. The player models are beautifully designed and are some of the best in a game yet. Players move and feel distinctly lifelike and react to awkward bounce pace and spin with distinct realism. The players clothes both move and look very realistic and hang loose on there body’s creasing up and folding as they move around, as the players sweat there shirts will begin to show stains which is a nice graphical effect and just adds to realism that Rockstar were aiming for. The environments and stadiums are very well designed and have some nice looking light effects, though both the crowd and the referee's both look distinctly less detailed than the players but overall Table Tennis is a great looking game.
Table Tennis has a fairly decent sound track that fits in appropriately with the game, which is accompanied by some amazing sound effects. The sound track isn’t used much throughout the main game but comes into play when a rally is building up which is a nice touch and overall Table Tennis sounds great.
Multiplayer is available for up to two players both offline and online, and though this is fine, a doubles mode would had been nice to have seen appear though two on two is fine. Online Table Tennis supports leader boards and plays from the standard perspective, where as in the offline multiplayer as split screen would have been rather disjointing and near impossible to have achieved, it supports a new top down perspective specifically for offline multiplayer which works well and is relatively easy to get used to.
The main problem with Table Tennis is its lack of features, there is your standard expedition matches where you and a selected player go through a ladder ranking of players until you beat the number one player in that difficulty and move on to the next difficulty, there is a timed tournament mode and finally online support. All the standard features which you would usually see in a sports game such as an in depth career mode or a create a player function that are sadly missing here and would had been greatly appreciated. Achievements are supported and most of them you will get simply by breezing through the expedition mode but some of them do take some hard earned time to get.
There are 11 players in total in Table Tennis and unlike standard sports games in which they all are just different models of a similar playing character, they all play completely different from each other, whether they favour spin, power or are a mixture of both they all have there pros and cons and its up to you to try and test each individual character yourself to see in which one suits best your playing style.
Upon a first play it is easy to criticise Table Tennis, but upon getting used to the games very in depth game mechanics and its incredibly fast paced addictive playing style you get an immense appreciation of what Rockstar games have achieved, and that is possibly the most true to life sports games on the market to date.