Basic, yet addictive tennis game for Android

Play Tennis is a no-frills Android tennis game with bags of gameplay to keep you entertained on a long journey.

The style of Play Tennis is much more like the ping pong game World Cup Table Tennis than the lavish Android sim, Virtua Tennis Challenge. By this, I mean that you ‘hold’ the racket in your hand and move it around by holding your finger down and swiping it across the screen.

No players appear on screen in Play Tennis, only the rackets. Your racket is at the bottom and you need to hit back every shot your opponent plays – or force them into an error. There’s very little you can do tactically (you can’t apply spin or play drop shots, for example), and the key to Play Tennis is all about directing your shots out of the opponent’s reach.

Although Play Tennis is basic in comparison with Virtua Tennis, it’s by no means in the ‘Pong’ category of tennis games. The courts are well presented, ball physics vary depending on the court surface, and there are some neat sound effects. That said, there are only two surfaces in the game and the umpire is very lazy – he seems to call out the score only when he wants to!

The challenge in Play Tennis is to pick a country and defeat every other nation in the game in a best of five games match. You can only unlock the next country once you’ve beaten the previous one.

There’s no online or even WiFi multiplayer in Play Tennis and the AI of the computer opponent isn’t great, with the CPU very rarely playing the ball out of the court, yet somehow managing to miss very easy shots.

Play Tennis is fun and absorbing, but you can’t help thinking that with a bit more polish this could have become one of the classic Android sports games.