I'm an experienced tennis player and qualified coach of 20 years so I was pleased when this game came out. I have played nearly all tennis games that have come out in the past. This is actually one of my favorites, but I think that's more because its VR as the actual game is good, but it still needs lots of work. I think it's too expensive but hopefully the developer will make some much-needed improvements as it does have a few annoying bugs.

The + points for me are

- It rewards correct strokes
- Your racquet grip matters
- Taking the ball early is important
- Body position matters too
- It feels very realistic sometimes
- Ball control is there for the most part

The negatives, unfortunately, are a long list
- Only one player save slot, so if anyone else wants to play, they are using your save game.
- No rewards for winning tournaments such as player upgrades
- The racket it too big and out of proportion to a real racquet
- It's too easy in arcade more. After just a few game beating the top players was easy and requires little more than keeping the ball in play.
- Your opponent can't return your net shots? It's a serious flaw.
- lobbing is flukey and done by slicing the ball which is wrong.
- Opponent animations are not great
- Short balls for both players should be punished more
- Needs more game modes
- Serving in simulation mode is almost impossible
- Hitting big winners should be more satisfying
- More control over where you player moves would be great
-

TLDR: I found a bug, developer immediately fixed it overnight.

I'm changing my review to positive, your immediate jump to fix bugs is what we need in VR.

Locomotion does not work when accepting a serve - so serves are not possible to return in a small gameplay area. A well hit serve is literally out of reach for me.

First let me provide some background on me - I'm a high level trennis player - I played competitvely at the college level and one of my reasons for buying HTC was to explore tennis in VR. The bottomline: This is a good game, better in many respects than I expected, but it can certainly be improved. I highlight the improvements that can make this game better:

1. Probably the best thing about the game is that it accuarately reflects the players attempt to hit down the line versus crosscourt - this was very impressive. However, it does not reflect the players attemp to hit high over the net versus low over the net - ie, lobbing is not possible. This results in not being able to hit the ball out by hitting it long. You can miss wide and miss in the net, but I wasn't able to miss by hitting the ball too deep - past the baseline.

2. The angle of the racquet is mostly accurate - however, the game overrides really bad angles. For instance if I attempt to hit the ball on the ground by angling the head down, the ball can still go over the net. I assume this is set up to help people who aren't really tennis players. I understand this, but I feel making the game more realistic is worth it.

3. The player is able to teleport from backhand to forehand instead of running from side to side - again I understand why, but I think there should be a no-teleport option for players that have the space and want a more realistic experience.

4. I like that serving is difficult, but I feel topspin serves aren't reflected accurately.

Again, this is a really really good game. If you play tennis I would 100% buy this game without hesitation. If you don't play tennis seriously, this game is also worth it as the realism is better than I was originally expecting.

Being 40 odd and not thin, I imagined such athletically challenging games such as tennis were way out of my ability to not be terrible at.

First Person Tennis has done nothing to change this. However, it showed me I was terrible in a ridiculously superb way.

Let's get the obvious stuff out of the way. The graphics are not going to wow and amaze you. They're functional, and clear, and right now, that's really all that matters. I would be very pleased if the developers would spruce up the visuals, maybe a few more human models would be good - it's a lil creepy to look around the court and see line umpire and crowd clones...

The game itself is put simply, tennis. Playing in VR is an absolute must. Arcade mode is fun for those who have difficulty doing anything involving hand-eye coordination - you just swing in the general direction of the ball, and the computer will try and figure out where, if you were Wawrinka, the ball should land. You still have to put SOME effort in, like roughly aiming, and varying swing speed a bit... But on the whole, you'll feel like Nadal on a good day when you start figuring out how to swing the racket and actually hit the ball.

Simulation is clearly the more challenging version. It is still a touch forgiving - the game apparently assumes you have Murray's arm muscles as you can hit that ball at ridiculous speeds if you put lots of effort into it - which is a bit unrealistic. (I would like to see a calibration option to perhaps judge how fast you swing compared to a pro player, in order to connect you to the ball a little better). However, once you get the general idea of correct swing speed, the feel of hitting the ball and it going in roughly where you were aiming is most impressive. As I mentioned, I'm clearly terrible at tennis, and while I attribute it to my skills and spacial awareness, it DID feel occaasionally like I missed what I thought was a hit. Still, that is very likely a skill and not a game issue.

One thing I will complain about is the lack of hand/arm. Inexplicably, your FREE hand is shown onscreen, but your racket hand isn't. Now, this is a little disconcerting, and I would very much like to see a hand there, just to reassure my brain that I am indeed holding a racket and not controlling it with just the power of thought. And I think I would like to see my arm and a body too - it doesn't need to be a 1:1 copy (please), but I think it might help with positioning while stretching to meet a just-out-of-reach ball.

Movement is done exceptionally well, with 3 options - Teleport, which simply moves you to a position you can hit the ball, Sliding, which literally slides you to the right position - more natural in terms of moving, but could cuase some people to be motion sick possibly. The third is like teleport, but allowing you to swing your arms in front of you to move to the net (the other 2 options you click the thumbstick if you want to approach the net) - I've not tried this one yet and it sounds a little odd.

Finally serving. This is probably the most difficult and frustrating part of the game - in Simulation mode anyway (Arcade is much easier). Now, the devs did something I highly appreciate, given I only have a partially working left hand. To toss the ball, you can simply do just that, holding the grip button on the left controller, and letting go at the top of the toss. The ball will faithfully follow the parabola you set, and you swing your racket to hit it at the right time - and hope your aim is good.

I can't do this, because my arm doesn't really do what I tell it. So the devs have added a one-handed operation, which I am most impressed with. Simply by holding the racket hand grip button, a ball will appear, move your hand up and release will send the ball directly up at a fixed speed, allowing you to concentrate on actually hitting it. It's a great addition, and very thoughtful for those like me, or just those who are useless at throwing things straight!.

Limitations? VR is always going to have a few issues, and as usual, the viewport is going to be a pain. Because headsets have a limited FOV, you can't really use your peripheral vision to track the position of your racket or ball to make an accurate shot. Serving is also difficult as you don't really see the racket just before you strike - and this makes aiming a bit more difficult. I imagine with plenty of practice, you can probably compensate for this, but I would keep it in mind as it will likely frustrate for a while.

This game is crying out for multiplayer.

Overall, I think I'm going to have a hell of a lot of fun with this. It will absolutely improve fitness, there's no question there. The more room you have to play the better, as when in slide mode, it doesn't mean you're always in the perfect position to hit.. you need to move a little bit too, and this is a Good Thing - assuming you don't have a wall in the way.

No refund from me today.

First person tennis - The real tennis simulator gives you a very realistic tennis feeling but in VR, with the help of the VR controllers, the necessary movements quickly feel like you are really on the field.
You have different movement choices with which you want to use free movement or automatic movements, but to keep the realism high, it is best to choose the free movement.

Check out some multiplayer gameplay here:

I have really tried to like this game. I really have. I've played for approximately 20 hours and I just can't stand it anymore. I bought it because I read somewhere it's the best VR tennis game there is. I sincerely do hope that isn't the case.

Tl:dr: Don't buy it if you're looking for VR tennis. This game is so far removed from tennis due to its mechanics and its quirks and errors that you have to relearn everything you know to come anywhere close to being competent and I simply don't want to do that.

There are several key things wrong with the mechanics of the game, the most grueling two being the force calculation and the trajectory calculation after impact with the racket. When you hit the ball with the racket, the ball gets projected in the direction you hit it in the millisecond it made contact with the racket, , meaning anything else that happens after does not affect its trajectory. This is fine for shots where the ball hits the racket and rebounds quickly, but it's a garbage way to calculate smashes, for example. When you're at the net and you try to hit a smash, everything depends on how the racket hits the ball initially. It doesn't matter if you follow through by continuing to move the racket downward, the ball doesn't care. This means you can't hit a proper smash, because the ball will just limp forward in the direction your racket was pointed the instant you hit it and the smash becomes a drop shot and it ruins the rally.

This is all for Arcade, by the way. It gets amplified in Simulation, where if you don't angle the racket just right, the ball will either fly way out or hit the net. Remember before when I said this calculation method mostly worked for forehands and backhands? Well, in Simulation, that is no longer the case. Because the game isn't forcing the ball to go in the right direction anymore, a simple backhand turns into a nightmare.

The force calculation is also done incorrectly. When you hit a ball, the game tries (tries) to calculate how fast the ball should rebound. I don't know how it does this for sure, but I do know that it leads to you ending up flicking your wrist more than properly swinging your arm, because the latter is useless. If a ball is approaching and you swing your arm as you normally would for a tennis game, (besides causing your headset to not be able to track your controller momentarily, glitching the game out, though this isn't a problem with the more expensive headsets with tracking towers which most people don't have) you hit the ball slower than you would if you just place the racket in front of the ball and flick your wrist forward. This, combined with the bad direction calculation, only exacerbates these problems.

Another huge problem the game has is the movement in general. As I've said, there are several ways you can move around the court, the main ones being the joystick and the auto run. Both are broken.

When you try to run with your joystick, for some reason, you barely move at all sometimes, rendering it useless, at least for me. There probably is some way for it to work or some specific thing I have to do with my hand to force it to work, but if you can't tell from this review, I am done learning this game's every error and its fix to just be able to play. I am therefore forced to use Auto run, which is probably the single most broken thing in the game. I've been thinking about writing a review on this game but I kept giving it chance after chance after chance, and I just played a match where the AI screwed me so many times I just decided it was time.

First off, the AI decides whether you're hitting a forehand or a backhand by either standing to the left or to the right of the ball, and generally, it does a good job of predicting what you want to do. But not that rarely, when you're running after the ball, as you approach it, it randomly decides to switch at the very last second, when you're already positioned to hit a forehand, for example, and the ball has already passed you before you can do anything. This has happened enough times to warrant a mention here. Sometimes, the AI also just decides to move forwards for absolutely no reason. The ball is coming in diagonally and you could hit it if you just move left a little, but the AI decides that it would be a better course of action to run up to the net for no reason, making hitting the ball literally impossible.

Yet another problem, which happens every single time someone hits a lob, is that the AI works in a way where it decides to go somewhere once the opponent has hit the ball, goes there and just stays there until you hit the ball again, which means that sometimes, when the opponent hits a lob or a drop shot and forces you to run up to the net, the AI calculates where it should place you, runs up and stops dead in its tracks, making hitting the shot impossible. I've hit the ceiling with my controller several times just from trying to jump high enough to hit a shot I could have hit by just moving backwards. Another case where this is a problem is when the ball bounces next to you. Instead of moving back, it just stays right where it is, forcing you to hit very low (and therefore very weak) shots to continue the rally. And when it isn't doing that, when you run up to hit a shot, instead of taking on more of an intermediate position, it runs all the way back to the center mark, and since when you return a far left shot in this game it almost always is another far left shot, you can't do anything and have to watch as the ball flies past you while the AI panics.

The final problem I have with the movement is that the game thinks you are in an actual tennis court, because it expects you to launch yourself horizontally Monfils-style sometimes. It just stops and expects YOU to move the remaining distance to hit the shot comfortably, which just doesn't work, and I have a fairly large play area. These five problems I have just listed have happened in about 50% of the rallies in a single 3 set match. Unplayable.

On top of all this, it's a buggy mess. It crashes about 10% of the times you try to boot it up, it occasionally locks up when you try to enter a game mode, select a language or enter a match forcing you to close it (and sometimes it locks up again after doing that), your racket disappears sometimes and you have to delete your entire character to fix it, your opponents may become invisible, the ball sometimes just flies out in a random direction when you hit it in the most slightly unorthodox way, the force calculation sometimes bugs out and doesn't give the ball enough force to even make it past the net (even after hitting it with the same exact way as a previous, successful shot), the ball sometimes disappears, softlocking the game and forcing you to restart the entire match and more things I can't remember right now.

You may say, "buT YOu'rE oNLy SaYiNg tHiS BEcAusE yOu'RE bAd! HoW is iT thaT THEre aRe goOd PLayeRs iF thE gaMe doEsn'T woRk?". They're good because they learned every single quirk and mastered every single technique associated with playing this game. I want to play tennis, and as I have explained in this review, this game isn't tennis. It's based on tennis, but the way the mechanics work forces you to completely relearn everything you know about playing real tennis, and this comes from someone who has played tennis for over 12 years.

I have tried to look past everything I have mentioned in this review, but today I reached my breaking point. If you are willing to spend hundreds of hours mastering this game's every quirk and mechanic, yes, you can get better and enjoy yourself. But I don't. I want to play tennis. And this game is not tennis. Do not buy this game if you're looking for that experience. I am one match like the one I played today away from refunding the game and uninstalling it, especially since the game is already overpriced for what it is.

I play tennis regularly and I bought this anticipating realistic tennis game but this is not even close to realism. Poorly timed shot still go over the net without error. Ball and racket physics are poor.
Graphics are VR experience is cool but this is nothing more than like a casual Wii game in terms of realism and gameplay.

Update- Every complaint i had has been fixed this game is updated constantly, its my favorite game of all time, and today i learned you can play with one controller which allows you to hold the racket with both hands making the game even more realistic than it already was, I love this game


Been playing for a while now and cant recommend this game highly enough especially considering how much i love this game and its still early edition this ones worth the money


This game is everything i dreamed of i was nervous about purchasing it because i was afraid it would suck, it doesnt i cant play it on simulation because its a little to tough to serve but in arcade mode i just did a 25 minute set it was awesome the mechanics are amazing, i watch tennis all the time and i want to play so bad but have no one to play with this game just answered my prayers,

I like the visual fidelity but there are some issues for sure.

1) The physics are NOT realistic.Even in simulation. Don't believe me?Try making a drop shot from the baseline. The ball doesn't move according to the raquet's interaction with the ball but rather the expected trajectory for the ball off of a good shot. You can't give it flight, the spin is not genuinely applied. This fact applies to all shots, it just looks convincing if you're trying a simple top spin shot.

I request the developer to take a look at Eleven table tennis for reference and look at the realism. Trajectory, spin, air resistance and gravity. It's true, it's natural.

The game could be amazing if it allowed the players to be creative. Right now it's just like we're picking from a couple trajectories and speed is applied to it.

2) The automatic run(which is the most immersive one) will not place you in the optimal place at times but more importantly you can't give it a certain instruction, like try to volley or stay deeper in the baseline. So if I build a volley character I don't see any way for automatic locomotion to work for me. Automatic locomotion also resists your natural attemps to get in a better position.

3) Least important but commentary can be shallow.

Mikori Games made this REALLY AMAZING Tennis Game in VR.

The feeling of serving a (digital) tennis ball onto the court.
The rush of jumping forward to the net.
The power you feel from smashing a ball into your opponents court.
It truly is an amazing and life-like game.
The hit detection is great as I hit the ball low and it touched the white top of the net and then bounced into my opponents court.
The feeling of achieving that was amazing - it was pure luck for me - but amazing nonetheless.
I truly love this game! You will not regret buying this!

First of all let me tell you that I am a sick individual with a list of problems. Allergies, astma, severe car/vr sickness etc.
But when I play this game (with the aircon on) I just lose myself in the Tennis Arena.
Games where you have to put different movement into aren't really good for me. Example: Boxing games. It's too much.
But First Person Tennis really puts my body at ease and there is enough time for my body to relax in-between the serving and the hit / rally.

In my opinion there are only pro's to discuss except maybe one little con or dislike and that is that the Music is too loud.
You can turn the music down but you will also be turning down the audience and commentator. Because everything is integrated in one slider. But that's an easy fix for the studio, I am sure. Also I would love to see Index Controller support.

However, the game FEELS amazing and looks really good too.
I drift in real life with my car and I used to skateboard for over 10 years but I really want to do certain things in VR.
Always liked sports games but I just can't do the really intense ones. (I try them sometimes).

First Person Tennis is really great and I thank Mikori Games for sending it to me.

This is actually my first game-for-free review and even a noob like me can learn how to tennis.
A video will be coming soon to my youtube channel if you want to check it out: Lycan-Strife.

The graphics are good eventho the stadium and people look minimal. But ofcourse it's all about the court, the ball, your opponent and you with your racket.

I truly love bouncing the ball 2 or 3 times before throwing it up for a serve.
I am amazed by the hit detection and how everything matters with how you hit the ball and how you hold your racket.
You can't smash your racket (yet) ;) maybe in the future? haha.

You can do tournaments, multiplayer matches, training.
Change the appearance of your character (they even have camo outfits - really dope).
Change your stance / hands. Teleport or run into place etc.
There are enough options and for just PURE feeling this game is worth it's price.

Maybe in the future I will add more things to my review but for now it's a MUST BUY if you like sports games.
I did not know I could love tennis more, but thanks to this game I do. (And believe me, I suck at this game BUT it's pure fun).
Thanks!