Back in 2003, Microsoft published a tennis game by the name of Top Spin. You might have heard of it - it quickly became the new king of tennis, knocking Virtua Tennis from the top slot, and with its deep gameplay, gorgeous looks and online play, it achieved that rare accomplishment of breaking through the sports game barrier and hitting mainstream appeal, regardless of your interest in actual tennis. Flash forward three years and it's now 2K Sports who take up publishing duties for Power & Magic's sequel, Top Spin 2. However, there's already a terrific line-up of Xbox 360 games available and with the promise of many wondrous titles just around the corner, can PAM work their magic once more?

The short answer is, yes, they can! Upon loading up the game you're greeted with some wonderful presentation - everything about this game is very slick, right down to the loading screen, which allows you to circle the globe and read about each of the near twenty venues on offer. You can dive straight in with an Exhibition match, singles or doubles, alone or with friends, on any court and with any combination of the assortment of accurately represented pros available. Got more than four people? Then set up a Tournament for up to sixteen players that you can even save and come back to later. If you want a bit of multiplayer madness then there are three party games available too and they're a real blast - Splash Court sees you painting each other's side of the court by scoring points, Wall Breaker gives your opponent a wall of boxes to be knocked down while you defend your own wall and finally Time Bomb sees two clocks counting down to zero, the active clock switching to the player who last had a point score against them. The end result? The first person to run out of time explodes! However, the meat of the game comes in the comprehensive Career mode and, with a multitude of training exercises on offer, this is the place where you should begin your Top Spin 2 experience.

Of course, no sports game these days is complete without character creation, and Top Spin 2 customises where no tennis game has customised before - the range of options is limitless and you can change everything about each aspect of the face in a multitude of ways - jaw, cheeks, eyes, brow, chin, you name it, you can change it, and if you're willing to spend enough time you can get a damn good likeness of yourself. Once you've got your player created you begin the calendar year with the default sponsor and trainer; a number of alternatives are on offer as you progress through the ranks from #200 right up to the top spot. You regularly receive emails and well acted voicemails from various people with a range of nationalities and corresponding accents, keeping you company as you plough through your career. At first you can't enter many competitions, so you can either skip the current fortnight or spend some of your points on training exercises.

These exercises are easy at first but they get challenging quickly and without any real guidance on exactly how the controls work it becomes something of a trial and error experience. This can be frustrating, as it's hard to know exactly how far to push the left analogue stick to guide the ball where you want it to go, but the controls are responsive and with some practice you'll get the hang of it. This is not an easy game by any means and mastering it could take a very long time. For now though, your best friend is the green button, which performs a safe shot - not that near the line, but it'll never, ever go out of bounds or hit the net. The sooner you can get in position and the longer you can hold down the button in anticipation of hitting the approaching ball (the actual swing of the racket is automatic as long as you're within reach) the more range you have to send the ball where you want with that safe shot. The same applies to the other shot types too.

As you progress, you're taught the basics in a series of free training sessions, where you learn the difference between the four shot types - safe, drop, spin and lob - and then get the chance to throw the right trigger into the mix, which requires split second timing and lightning fast reactions to use. Get it wrong and the ball is going into the net or off the court. This is something that will take a long time to get the hang of and is best experimented with in Exhibition matches - it really is difficult to pull off, but when you get it right, the results are very pleasing! The training exercises that cost your hard-earned points put you up against either your trainer or obstacles on the court - a giant ball to hit, a wall of boxes to knock down, dominos, bowling pins, highlighted patches on the court - each exercise focuses on a certain area of your training to help improve your serving, volleying, shot types and more. They're often timed or have a limited number of serves, making them that much trickier and having to pay for them only to fail can be frustrating.

When you hit the court for the first time though, you'll be very impressed with the visuals - each of the big venues, from Australia to the U.S. and England's Wimbledon Centre Court have been authentically reproduced down to the smallest details and they each look amazing. The small local courts, such as the one at the Mediterranean Leisure Club, the Chicago street court and the Mexican court, all look gorgeous too and they're just oozing with the atmosphere of the locale, with maybe a dozen people gathered to watch, working up to the 20,000 or more spectators for the biggest venues and events. Most of these can be played at dusk too, for added atmosphere. The audience looks great, each person fully formed and individually animated, and while repetition of clothing and movement is used, they do form a very convincing and realistic looking crowd. The ambience is enhanced by lifelike sound effects too - the sound of the ball hitting the racket and bouncing on the court is of course as good as the real thing, but details like the squeaking of trainers on clay have not been neglected, while you can hear passing traffic and other background sounds on the small courts. The audience is brilliantly dynamic and you can often tell when you're the underdog and the audience is against you, cheering madly for your opponent and gradually warming to you as you assert yourself and give them a great match to watch.

Of course, the real star of the visuals is the players themselves - the animation is so fluid and the transition from one movement to another is so perfect that it basically looks like two real people are playing tennis with each other, as you watch your player run across the court, reach to volley the ball back and then change direction to speed back into the middle you simply won't believe how smooth and natural it all looks, while the motion of the various racket moves is second to none. It really is a marked improvement on anything we've seen before.

As you progress through your career you earn bronze stars from training and then silver and gold stars from matches, which you can add to an assortment of stats, everything from power, speed and stamina to volley, service and backhand. These stats make a marked difference to your player's performance too - if you don't believe me, try taking your fairly new player online into a ranked match and watch with dismay as you are utterly destroyed by a player with nearly full gold stars for every stat. Then head to a custom game and see how the odds even out, as here you both use professional players and things are much more balanced. Online the competition is ruthless and fierce, and after getting trounced four times in a row in ranked matches, I headed over to custom exacted my revenge on a hapless bystander - oh how I cackled with glee as I trounced him, payback has rarely been sweeter! There's no doubt that the online mode enhances the game's lifespan, just be warned that if you intend to do well in ranked matches, you will have to put the hours in to build your custom player up to the max in order to have a chance at winning - otherwise you'll just be running up and down the court swatting flies, while your opponent silently, or not so silently, laughs at your feeble efforts.

Top Spin 2 takes everything that was great about the original and enhances it with some simply fantastic next generation visuals, adds even more depth to the gameplay and controls, delivers a comprehensive Career mode complete with sponsorship, trainers and even fully customisable bling and new rackets to buy, and provides a lag free and highly enjoyable (when you're winning!) online experience. I gave the original a 10/10 and this one is better - so why am I scoring it a 9 this time around? Well, the answer is simple - the gameplay still gets a 10, but I feel that as fantastic as the gameplay is, it doesn't quite achieve universal appeal in light of the competition. I generally speaking can't stand sports games and as enjoyable as Top Spin 2 was, I couldn't help but eye up The Outfit and Burnout: Revenge sitting on my shelf and just begging to be played, games from two genres that are much more up my street. If you loved Top Spin or you even vaguely enjoy tennis games then this is a must have, no question, and while I do feel that there's a hell of a lot here for non-sports fans, whether or not you want to invest your money and the amount of time needed to get the most from this undeniably deep and satisfying gaming experience is down to you. Anyway, enough of all this deliberation, break out the strawberries and don't go easy on the cream! Sorry. I had to…

Reviewed by Geoff Holland for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).