One of the game types I rather enjoy with motion controls is tennis. After getting my hands on with Sports Champion‘s Table Tennis mode, I had high hopes that Racquet Sports would further my enjoyment by bringing a solid tennis game with one-to-one motion controls. Sadly, it didn’t deliver that experience. I swung for the fences on every shot and never ended up with a monster smash down the line.

The game feels like a slightly higher resolution version of the Wii game Ubisoft shipped last December. The characters are higher-res Mii variants and the environments are less that average for what we’ve come to expect from HD gaming. Racquet Sports offers five game types: tennis, table tennis, beach tennis, badminton, and squash. While vanilla tennis is the main draw, checking out each of the other modes gave puzzlingly similar feels. Since you’re not at all controlling your character’s movements and the motion controls don’t feel truly one-to-one, each of the game modes plays identically, except having a different court or table on the screen (badminton smashes being the only difference). Sure, you can hold the T button on the Move controller to hammer the ball down the line, which does add a bit more precision, but I would have liked to see a bit more differentiation between the game types. I know they aren’t worlds apart, but subtle variation here and there goes a lone way.

What bothered me the most about Racquet Sports was how little it reflected the precision controls of the Move. The whole time, the game really felt like a Wii port without much extra polish slapped on. Sure, you get online multiplayer, but have fun finding a quality match. If you really need some tennis action right away, $29.99 isn’t too much to spend for Racquet Sports. It’s an average game and one that I feel was rushed to meet the launch window of the PlayStation Move. Had Ubisoft spent a bit more time on the precision controls, this would be a keeper. As it stands, keep it in the rental category.

[A copy of the game was provided by the publisher for review purposes.]