If you think you've played a tennis game before, think again. If you think Virtua Tennis 2 is as good as it gets, prepare to be blown away. Because Top Spin isn't just the best tennis game I've ever played - it's the best sports game I've ever played. I found it far more addictive and enjoyable than NHL 2003, Virtua Tennis 2, WWE Raw or anything else I've come across in that wide old genre of sports games. I was expecting great things from Microsoft but they really have outdone themselves and created an infinitely playable masterpiece. Anyway, I'd better stop gushing and get on with the review.

The opening sequence to Top Spin is simply awesome and immediately the realism of the graphics hits you, as men and women volley the ball back and forth over the net in a series of great clips viewed from all manner of different angles. The surprisingly heavy rock music that accompanies the intro actually works pretty well. There are a number of options to choose from at the main menu - Exhibition, Custom Tournaments (an extension of Exhibition where you create your own saveable tournaments), Career, Multiplayer and Tennis School. The first thing I did was nip into Tennis School, which is series of very quick and simple videos but as the controls are so well-designed and intuitive it does the job fine - besides, the real training is tucked away in the Career mode, which I'll come to later. After this I went to Exhibition, a mode that gives you a one-off match with any combination of 1 to 4 human or computer players. I started off with a Men's Singles match, with 3 games and 3 sets. And I got trounced. I replayed the match and I got trounced again. D'oh! I went back to the Exhibition menu and chose two different players then proceeded to win a match - woo hoo! (sorry, I've been playing The Simpsons Hit & Run too much!) Anyway, a few more matches and I was really hitting a good stride, so I set myself and my opponent back to the combination I had for my first two matches and trounced him - this was not only very satisfying but proved that my game was already improving.

The sheer volume of courts available is quite amazing and they are divided into five sections from Grand Slam (the four biggest venues in the world including Wimbledon) through Major Pro, Minor Pro and Pro to Playground, which is without any audience and features an amazing 21 courts in a variety of locations set all over the world. Each court looks very realistic with detailed textures and great scaling. In Wimbledon the stands are obviously pretty big and they are packed with people. I have lost count of the number of lame, 2D cardboard cutout crowds I've seen in sports games, but here for the first time every single person in the crowd is individually animated. They clap at different times, they move differently and they all stand up and applaud a great play, as a real crowd would. The effect is quite simply astounding and having such a realistic audience really does create an atmosphere quite unlike anything I've played before. The crowd noise is spot on too; the amount of applause varies depending on how many people are in the crowd and how well you and your opponent are playing, the clapping fading out naturally and even some crazy woman shouts out "Come on, Petey!" now and again during a match where you're playing as Sampras. Throw in officials stood and sat all around the court, ball boys waiting at the side of the net and the umpires up on their stands and you've got the most authentic looking and sounding courts you've ever seen.

However, the brilliance of the courts is actually outdone by the player animation. The fluidity of the movement is unprecedented and this is the most realistic animation I've seen in any game, ever, outdoing even the likes of Splinter Cell in these stakes. The way the players walk onto the court is perfect; they look like real people walking, not taking stilted and regimentally regular steps. Serving animations are wonderful as is the way the players react as they run around the court. Most games that feature great animation are let down by a lack of animation joining the various movements together, meaning that if you suddenly change direction your player jerks around and skips a few frames. Not here though. There is no jerkiness between transitions at all, ever. You can run across the court, dive for the ball, hit it back, jump to your feet and leg it back the other way to whack the ball back again and then watch the whole thing in slow motion replay. Even slowed down it all looks so natural that you could almost be watching the real thing; every hit, every step, every burst of speed looks completely convincing. Even in situations when you run forward to go for the ball and it hits the net, your player runs to a halt and then turns around and walks away. No words, or screen shots, can do justice to this game - you simply have to see it in action.

Rounding off the graphics are superb sounds, with clear sounding samples for all the ball noises, along with the scuffing of feet on harder courts and the variety of voices that shout OUT! There is no music in the matches, which to my mind is definitely for the best, as it would just detract from the realism and atmosphere. The smallest venues that have no audience or umpire are very relaxing after the packed courts of the Pros and you can really appreciate the ambient sounds as various insects and birds click and tweet all around you, should you have the 5.1 surround sound that this game takes full advantage of.

All this realism wouldn't be much good if the game was a dog to play though, so I'm delighted to say that the gameplay and controls are almost as impressive as the graphics. Making use of the four main buttons to make flat, topspin, slice and lob shots, the shot you want is a simple button press away. The flat serve is fast but has no spin, however you'll never send it out of play no matter how hard you hit it. The topspin shot gives you a high bounce whilst the slice keeps the ball low with backspin and both of these are great for getting the ball past your opponent but you have to be careful when directing the shot as they can go out of bounds. The left and right triggers finish off the options, with left trigger doing a drop shot to land just over the net and the right doing a risk shot, which is extra powerful and fast. The catch with these two is that you must pull the trigger and release it at the right moment to get the shot right, as a line whizzes up and down a bar and you must release it so it ends up pretty near the centre of the bar. Get this wrong and the drop shot could hit the net whilst the risk shot will just whack the ball right out of play. These shots are both very tricky to start using, let alone master, but are also great for beating your opponent, so experiment with them when you're ahead. Everything but the lob shot can be used to serve too, with the same system in each case.

Once the serve is away you must run around the court to position yourself to return the ball. As soon as the ball reaches the net you press and hold the button for the type of shot you want. The longer you hold the button before the ball arrives and the better placed you are (the hit is automatic as long as you're holding the button and in the right place) then the better the shot will be. It is at this point you use the left analogue stick to steer the ball the way you want it to go. Flat shots won't steer too sharply and whilst the spin shots do, if you direct them too far they'll go out of bounds. Fortunately the controls are both very intuitive and incredibly responsive, so it's only a few games before you're smashing shots past your opponent and beginning to think tactics in terms of getting them over one side of the court so you can blast the ball down the other. The learning curve is spot on and often if an opponent challenges you and gets in the lead you will get in the zone, rising to the occasion and improving your game as you do so. The controls are divine and the whole game plays perfectly. Doubles matches are a very different game to singles and a little trickier to master, so stick with the singles until you've got some consistently good form going.

Because I had a look around Exhibition for a while I was in good stead for Career mode. This begins with a very advanced player creation system that allows you to manipulate the shape of the face (jaws, lips, brow, cheeks, nose and the overall shape) and there are loads of hairstyles on offer with a few beards, moustaches and sideburns thrown in for good measure, along with accessories like earrings and glasses. You can determine your character's height, body shape, weight and muscle density and choose from a good variety of tops, bottoms, socks, shoes and racquets, most of which are unlocked during your career. Once you've got your male or female player created and named, it's onto the Career.

You start off in Europe but can at any time jet off to any part of the world, which is divided into seven regions. Each region features a variety of things to do, although most of them are locked at first. There are only one or two minor tournaments available in each region at first and there are Coaches that can teach you the various aspects of tennis (Serve, Forehand, Backhand and Volley) and thus improve your stats. You have 14 stars to spread on your empty stat bars but they can only be added by completing the challenges the coaches give you, which generally involve using different styles of shots to knock the ball into a marked area on the court. This training not only improves your character's abilities but also gives you a greater understanding of the nuances of the controls and the techniques you need to progress. It really is a brilliant system.

If you fancy a change of look you can go to the Salon for a new hairstyle or the Sports Shop to get the latest designer gear you unlocked, plus there are Sponsors that you can sign up with and get new gear from for free, providing you complete the tasks and challenges they require of you, which again vary in nature. However, the Tournaments are clearly where it's at and as you win tournaments your seed improves (you begin ranked as 100) with the aim to rise through the ranks until you eventually become number 1. Believe me, this is going to take a long time! However, the beauty of this system is that all your hard work carries over into your online matches, thus doubly justifying the effort.

Online there are two types of matches you can enter - Exhibition (with all the same settings as the offline mode) or Official XSN Matches. Your performance in Exhibition is tracked on leaderboards whilst the Official Matches actually affect your very own worldwide ranking. These matches can only be played with your own custom character from your Career, so suffice to say the more you play offline and build up your character's techniques and abilities, the better you will fare online. And it's an ingenious system as it allows you to either have a fun volley with your friends or a serious, competitive match that affects your ranking. Doubles games are available in Exhibition although slightly frustratingly Doubles must be played split screen with a friend, so you can only play doubles if you get a friend round and your opponent has done the same. Still, this isn't a big deal and the single games are more than addictive enough to keep you going indefinitely. It is so much more challenging, enjoyable and competitive to play against real people (as with any game) but with tennis it all happens so fast and is often so unpredictable that it really gets the adrenaline flowing.

Top Spin is a sports game that has it all - unparalleled graphics and amazingly realistic animation, addictive, deep gameplay that's supported by very intuitive controls, with almost as much atmosphere, challenge and competition as the real thing both in single player and on Xbox Live. Regardless of your feelings towards tennis games this really needs to be played and even if you think you really can't stand tennis games it's still worth a rental, just so you can see how wrong you were.

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