Since I mostly enjoy the game and would like to see it improve in some areas I thought I give it a shot and share my thoughts and experience.
About me: I am 37, living in Germany, played Tennis since I was 8yo and work as a professional UX designer. I always avoided Tennis games because for years they were complete garbage since it is very hard to create a game which puts emphasis on the most important aspects of a real Tennis match. So, I know about other Tennis games out there, looked at them, and bought TE4 but never played any other Tennis game on the Level of AO2 and co.
My gameplay:
- First time, I tried to play as a Junior but noticed this was very frustrating as I was just starting to learn the mechanics.
- I started a new career as a Pro.
- Club-level difficulty, Simulation controls with visual indicators, max or second-to-max speed boost
- I played for 18.8h, collected 26 of 57 achievements, am No 1 and just won the Olympics.
- My players stats average probably around ~60 or less.
1) Positive:
- TE4 puts a lot of emphasis on what I believe are important aspects during real Tennis matches: positioning/movement, shot selection, patience, identifying the opponent's strengths and weaknesses and adjusting the own play style accordingly.
- The Tennis match gameplay itself is fun and challenging. You can feel the different qualities when playing against opponents.
- The gameplay experience on the Steam Deck was mostly smooth, no crashes, everything works and can be configured although TE4 is not optimised for the Deck.
- The detail of the player customisation is great: I was able to use my favourite grip band (at least by changing the colour) and a style I typically wear on the court. Absolute fantastic is the ability to select animation styles and even have already now a pretty large variety of well-known swing styles.
- The detail of the player statistics are great.
- The Tutorial is simple enough to get started and learn from there.
- There is audio commenting on plays.
- Customisability of settings to adjust the game to my preferred play style is great. I can play more arcady or more simulation-like. I can even simulation games and play it more as a manager.
2) My "bad" experiences:
- a) User interface: Large portions of the user interface to navigate through, adjust settings, manipulate stats, select tournaments, review players, review matches are cumbersome to read and control. The structure of pages seems often unintuitive. Some pieces which should be settings on a separate view are part of a content layout.
- b) Experience and training hours: This may sound funny – It took me probably 8h until I realised I wasn't able to spent more of my experience points due to missing free/training time. There is no clear relation between those 2 currencies
- c) Audio quality: The quality of the movement, player grunts, and crowd do not feel like they are happening in the same space/room/place. This breaks the immersion in a quite subtle way, but the impact is very large. Even to that extend that I started to play with very low volume.
- d) Repetitive feeling: I played for ~18h on the same difficulty level, and the game starts to feel very repetitive. Why? Because besides grinding tournaments to get more XP to level up stats, there is literally nothing to do. No overarching story, no achievements, no unlocks.
- e) Approaching the net: Approaching the net seems to be a non-viable strategy. This could be due to the relatively low speed stat (50) but throughout all the matches I think I only went 2-3 times to the net and won a point. Other strategies seem significantly more effective and therefore more rewarding.
- f) Shot variety: Similar to the previous point, I mostly only play the normal shot or the strong shot and win all rallies via player movement and target selection. This might be due to my specific difficulty settings, but it already feels on this difficulty level wrong. I simply to not get taught to select other shots depending on the situation. Lobs and aggressive lobs are the exceptions here which I regularly use when the opponent approaches the net.
- g) The Steam Deck often struggles when starting a new point to get the frame rate sort of stable at 60 fps. I notice the problem to be less significant when turning the far crowd setting lower. Typically what happens is, when I am serving and a new point starts, the fps drops to 10-20 and then ramps up again to sixty within 1-3s. Sometimes this can impact the serve quality because the timing is off.
3) The "Why isn't this a thing?" moments
- a) Challenging calls: I think, the ability to challenge shots is must have feature. I do believe it is not trivial not make it work properly but I can imagine it being a very immersive game mechanic. For shots which a certain cm range close to the net there could a probability that the made call is wrong. And players can challenge each call at any time in the game.
- b) Make use of the money: I earned prize money, I steer the career of my player, but beyond stats, there is nothing to achieve. Who are my trainers, what is my gear, what about brand deals or sponsoring.
- c) Career and the public: Right now, the created player feels emotionless and – well – faceless. There is no relationship to fans, no rivalry, no player brand, in that sense, there is no career. Just matches and stats.
- d) Player emotes: They exist, but are not configurable? (Maybe I just didn't find this one.)
4) Recommendations: UI overhaul
- a) Overhaul most of the UI, page layouts, and navigation structure with the goal to make it as easy as possible and not become a challenge on its own.
- b) I have quite a couple of years of interface design and navigation architecture experience for quite complex systems and I was wondering whether is the potential interest in getting support. I am not talking about any compensation request here, I would just have an interest in exploring some options together with you and figure out how the visual language on the UI can add to the immersive story of building a career.
- c) I looked more in-depth into AO2, its UI structure and how certain functional pages are solved which are very similar in nature.
5) Recommendations: Career as core experience
- a) Imho, the career mode is the core experience which should not feel like a repetition of matches.
- b) Planning weeks and training should play a role.
- c) Hiring a manager, trainers, coaches should play a role.
- d) Basically, large portions of the Tennis Elbow Manager should actually be phases or aspects of the TE4 career mode.
- e) Besides that, the pure Tennis match gameplay needs to feel fun and challenging, as if it accomplishes something besides just another win or some stats. This could be building a reputation with the fans – Are you the "good guy" like Federer or the "bad guy" like Kyrgios? What coaches/trainers are willing/interested to work with you? What brands are interested in sponsoring deals? When starting is a junior, how does your flight ticket and hotel (or maybe even trailer) influence your game? Actions, clean wins, complaints to the umpire or bad technique should have consequences on your career.
- f) Of course, if the main gameplay, the match, does not feel like fun all the rest does not really matter. So, whatever ideas there might be to make the gameplay smoother, feel more precise, more tactical, make the player feel more in control and the general experience to be more immersive, pursue those ideas.
Overall, congrats to a very nice game. I see lots of potential here and based on what I see in reviews on the Gameplay of Tennis games with significantly larger teams, I like the pure Tennis match Gameplay mechanics of TE4 more. Would love to get some response of you especially on the UI topics or just in general.
All the best!
– David