Great graphics, fun gameplay, and a lot of replay value
Top Spin 2 is a very well made game and well worth 20 bucks. It is very addictive - the sort of game that you play for hours, then get an urge to start up again 20 minutes after you turn it off. Not only is it an accurate tennis simulation, it is a lot of fun to play, and career mode provides a fair bit of replay value to boot.
This game is an excellent tennis simulation. The physics model is very good - players move as quickly as you would expect professional tennis players to run. Shot selection is intuitive and not overly complicated - you can hit a safe, slice, topspin, and lob shot along with advanced shots which you need momentum for and risk shots for which you have to line up a rising meter much like for a serve. The longer you hold the button the more powerful the shot will be, and the harder you press on your joystick to aim the more angle (or depth) the shot will have. Of course, if you press or push too hard the shot will go out. Playing through a fair amount of matches at this point, I feel like the shots are well "balanced." That is, it isn't prohibitively difficult to aim shots without them going out once you get a feel for the controls, but making an unforced error is always a possibility. Admittedly, the game is pretty tricky to master. Proper timing is very important, and it actually helps to know real tennis strategy when playing matches at higher AI settings. The learning curve certainly isn't impossible, but it is steep enough that a friend playing the game for the first time won't be able to provide much challenge to an experienced player.
The two main modes that you will find yourself playing are either exhibition or career mode. Exhibition is just what it sounds like. You can play a singles or doubles match using either the 24 licensed professional male and female tennis players and/or your own custom made players loaded from career mode. You can choose to play best of 1, 3 or 5 sets and between 1 and 6 games per set, and of course you have a pretty broad range of stadiums in which to play. These include the "Court 1s" of all four Grand Slams as well as courts from several Tennis Masters Series events, courts for major and minor tournaments (which you can actually play in career mode) and playground courts that don't even have chair umps or linesmen. In career mode, you create a player who begins as the 200th ranked player in the world, and attempt to achieve the #1 ranking, winning Grand Slams, getting better and better endorsement deals, and earning money along the way. Endorsements are actually pretty cool, because they managed to include a mind-boggling amount of real tennis merchandise from famous brands in the game. For instance, you can buy your character a Babolat racquet of a Lacoste shirt or Prince shoes and you will actually see accurate depictions of real products. The level of competition rises as you play higher level tournaments. I can win minor league tournaments without dropping a set, but the first time I played Roger Federer, he took me out 0, 1 and 1 at the Australian Open. It's also worth mentioning that the character creation options are pretty impressive. You can design a completely unique face for your character, and the models I've made have come out looking almost like real players.
Another plus to the game are the graphics. All of the player animations are smooth and the player models in the game are really pretty amazing. The stadiums are rendered quite accurately, and there are even little touches like players throwing their racquets and pumping their fists after points.
This is not to say that the game is without issues. The graphics are very nice, but they require some serious processing power. I literally have to have the game on the lowest possible setting to play on my 2 year old machine. If you read some of the other reviews on here, you'll find that even people with relatively new machines have difficulty playing the game on high graphics settings. Meanwhile, the sound is arguably the weakest part of the game. As the Gamespot reviewer notes, the menu music is pretty crappy, generic rock, and although there are neat touches like chair umps speaking in the language of the country in which a tournament is located, I feel like there is otherwise a fairly small amount of on-court sound effects. If you play a match on the playground courts the crappy rock music plays in the background. This is really annoying and you can't turn it off. Also, the game does suffer from stability issues and has crashed occasionally on my computer. These crashes are fairly infrequent, but they are pretty annoying as they tend to happen in the middle of matches. I'm hoping that a patch will address this problem. Also, the manual is pretty sparse. The learning curve might not have been as bad, but the manual doesn't tell you much other than which button does which shot. It took me a while to figure out how to aim a non-safe serve, and when you can hit which "special" shots (the manual made it sound as though you need momentum for both advanced and risk shots when in fact you only need them for advanced shots.) The last major issue in my opinion is the licensing in the game. As I mentioned, there are 24 actual pros whose names and likenesses appear in the game - 12 men and 12 women. Not only do I kinda wish that there were more, the decisions as to which pros should be included are a bit bizarre. For example, while Maria Sharapova, Amelie Mauresmo and Venus Williams are (obviously) included, Serena Williams and Justine Henin are missing. On the men's side, you have guys like Sebastien Grosjean, Carlos Moya and Tim Henman who, while stars in their prime, are pretty washed up at this point, yet players like Rafael Nadal, David Nalbandian and Andy Murray are curiously omitted.
All in all, though, this is a great tennis game. Its shortcomings are honestly few and far between, and the bottom line is that it delivers a solid, realistic, and fun game of tennis. The sort of experience that can substitute for a real game of tennis on a day when you can't find anyone to play against. The medium and hard AIs provide a decent challenge, and you can also play against humans online or with multiple controllers in one computer for maximum replayability. And, for 20 bucks, it's a pretty good deal. It's a bit of a shame that it doesn't seem to be selling very well at the moment, and I would highly encourage this game if you have at least a passing interest in tennis - or even if you don't. You won't be disappointed.