Grand Slam Tennis 2 arrived in 2012 as EA Sports’ second swing at the sport, built by EA Canada for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. It carries Wimbledon and all four Grand Slams, a roster that runs from Djokovic, Federer and Nadal to Sharapova, Borg and McEnroe, and a control scheme called Total Racquet Control. The pitch is simple: swing the racket like a champion. The execution is good, not great.
Trailer, via GamePlayStation.
Total Racquet Control and the Right Stick
The headline mechanic is Total Racquet Control. Every shot maps to the right analog stick, and the game promises precision, accuracy and power in the player’s hands. That is the whole idea, and it mostly holds up. Shot placement rewards a deliberate flick rather than a mash, and the analog input gives you a reason to think about where the ball goes instead of just when you hit it.
It is also the part of Grand Slam Tennis 2 that will decide whether you stay. Players raised on a button press will find the first hour stiff. The scheme asks for a kind of touch that a face button never demanded, and the game does not always explain what it wants. When it clicks, the rally becomes a conversation. When it does not, you lose points to your own thumb.
PlayStation Move support is in the box. Kinect support is not. That omission matters less than it sounds, because the analog stick is the real control scheme here, and the motion option reads as an extra rather than the point.
A Roster That Spans Four Decades
The player list is the game’s best argument. Djokovic, Federer, Nadal and Sharapova cover the contemporary tour. Borg and McEnroe cover the past. That mix is not decoration. It feeds directly into the ESPN Grand Slam Classics mode, where you relive classic moments from Grand Slam tournaments across the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, plus Fantasy matches that put players from different eras on the same court.
This is where Grand Slam Tennis 2 has the most fun with its own license. A Federer-Borg Fantasy match is nonsense as history and perfectly sensible as a video game. The Classics mode gives the older names a reason to be on the disc beyond a menu portrait, and it is the mode most likely to pull you back after the career grind sets in.
ESPN broadcast integration wraps the whole thing in a television presentation. It is a coat of paint, but the right coat. Tennis is a sport that lives on television, and the game knows it.
The 10-Year Career Mode
Career mode is the spine. You create a tennis player and take them through 10 years of tournaments with one aim: finishing ranked number one. Points earned from matches accumulate into your ranking, so the climb is measured rather than declared.
Before each Grand Slam you can choose a training session, an exhibition match or a minor tournament. That is a real decision, not a formality. Training builds your player. Exhibitions and minor tournaments build points. You cannot do all three, and the season does not wait.
Ten years is a long commitment, and the mode’s pacing is where Grand Slam Tennis 2 shows its age. The structure is sound. The repetition is not disguised well enough, and by the middle seasons the loop of train, tune up, major starts to feel like a schedule rather than a story.
Pat Cash, John McEnroe and Paul van Dyk
Pat Cash provides commentary, continuing the role he held in the prequel. John McEnroe handles analysis. The pairing is smart casting: Cash for the tour knowledge, McEnroe for the edge. Commentary in sports games is usually the first thing to wear out, and this duo holds up longer than most.
The in-game music comes from DJ Paul van Dyk, who wrote and produced every track in the game. A single artist scoring an entire sports title is unusual, and it gives Grand Slam Tennis 2 a consistent sound instead of a licensed playlist stitched together at the last minute. Whether you like trance is a separate question. That the soundtrack has an author is not.
One more detail worth naming: an online pass code ships with the game, but EA confirmed it would not be required to access online multiplayer, citing “technical issues with the registration system.” That is a small mercy and a telling one. The pass existed. The infrastructure behind it did not.
What Grand Slam Tennis 2 Gets Right
The hard numbers first:
- Released 2012 for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360
- Developed by EA Canada, published by EA Sports
- Demo released January 10 for both platforms
- Critic aggregate: 7.6/10 across 6 outlets
- Career mode length: 10 years
- Grand Slams included: all four, including Wimbledon
- Move supported, Kinect not supported
Ranked by what actually matters in this game:
- Total Racquet Control — the reason to play it, and the reason some players will quit
- ESPN Grand Slam Classics — the mode with the best use of the roster
- Career mode — deep, but thin in the middle years
- Presentation — Cash, McEnroe and van Dyk do real work
- Online — functional, with the caveat EA itself attached
That ordering is the review. Grand Slam Tennis 2 is a control experiment wrapped in a licensed tennis game, and the experiment is the part worth your time. Everything else is competent.
Where the Game Loses Points
The roster is deep at the top and the Classics mode is a genuine idea, but Grand Slam Tennis 2 does not solve the problem that has always dogged tennis games: a season is long, and a video game season is longer. Ten years of tournaments is a promise the career mode cannot quite keep. The training, exhibition and minor-tournament choices are good design. They are also the same choices, over and over.
The Move support is a checkbox. The absence of Kinect is a limitation the game never addresses. The online pass story is a reminder that the parts of a sports game you never see are often the parts that break.
None of this is fatal. It is the difference between a game you finish and a game you keep.
The Verdict on Grand Slam Tennis 2
Grand Slam Tennis 2 is the better tennis game of its moment and not the best one it could have been. Total Racquet Control is a real idea, executed well enough to justify the learning curve. The Classics mode earns its place. Cash, McEnroe and van Dyk give the presentation a spine that most sports titles lack.
What holds it back is stamina. The career mode is built for 10 years, and the game runs out of ways to make year seven feel different from year three. EA Canada built a strong foundation and then asked it to carry more weight than it could.
If you want a tennis game that makes you think about your hands, this is it. If you want one that keeps surprising you into the second season, keep looking. The score below reflects a game that is very good at one thing and merely fine at the rest.
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