ps5 topspin 2k25 ( english )

I might be one of the most excited people in the world for Top Spin to return with Top Spin 2K25 because – and I know I’m showing my age here – Top Spin and I go way back. I reviewed the original back in 2003 when I worked at Official Xbox Magazine and gave it a well-deserved 9 out of 10 (IGN thought highly of it as well giving it a 9.3). It proved to be a riveting tennis sim with both real-life tennis stars to play as and an excellent create-a-player career mode that let you rise through the ranks battling for global leaderboard supremacy against other players. But Top Spin disappeared after the fourth entry in the series back in 2011 – so long ago that there hasn’t been a new Top Spin in the 12 years I’ve worked at IGN. Thankfully though that retirement has ended and Top Spin is back with 2K25. I played an hour of it and quickly found that while it lacks the top-shelf presentation its predecessors had in previous console generations it still plays fantastically.

Top Spin 2K25 delivers a lot of tennis’s biggest stars as playable athletes: recently retired legends like Serena Williams and Roger Federer ‘90s stars like Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf and new top-ranked players like Carlos Alcaraz and Coco Gauff. 2K and developer Hangar 13 promise 20 real-life pros in total and this is where I’ll levy my primary criticism of Top Spin 2K25 so far: presentation. While the build I played wasn’t final with the April release date fast approaching it’s unlikely too much will change between now and then in the graphics and animation department. Unfortunately there isn’t a lot of expression in the faces of the players that I saw which is disappointing but not a deal-breaker since of course you’ll button through the intermediate mini-cutscenes to get back to the action after you’ve seen them each a few times spending the bulk of your time playing from the familiar TV-style camera view.


Top Spin 2K25 Screenshots


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And that playing? Oh it seems like it’s going to make fans of the previous Top Spin games very happy. I confess I hadn’t played any Top Spin since 4 came out so I was rusty. I started working my way through 2K25’s tutorials – narrated by a surprisingly calm John McEnroe – before jumping into an exhibition match as Andre Agassi. It took me a couple of games to get my sea legs back underneath me – the serving mechanic in particular threw me for a loop as you have to press the corresponding face button harder and hold it down in order to get your meter going. But once I got locked in I didn’t drop a game after that settling into my familiar strategy of crushing pinpoint baseline returns to either outright win the point or set my opponent up to have to deal with a big shot on the next volley.

Perhaps the reason Top Spin 2K25’s gameplay felt so familiar and comfortable is that one of the developers told me during my demo that the team went back and looked at Top Spin 4 on a programming-code level.
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