I'm no Rodger Federer or Rafa Nadal but I do love a good sports sim and Tennis Elbow 2011 delivers an ace.
What I look for in a game like this is realistic gameplay, good sound effects, lots of realistic preferences and options and a decent challenging level of play. Tennis Elbow delivers on all counts. The ball movement, player movements and range of shots are as close to reality as you'll get on a tennis game on the Mac.
However, it is a bit tricky to get started. The first problem you'll have is configuring the controls. There's no point even trying to play with the mouse so just go for the keyboard settings that you can access by clicking "Controls" on the right menu. More details of keyboard controls can be found in the Public Notes below. Note that in this demo, you can only choose to play a one off match on one surface but in the full game you have all professional surfaces.
The player sometimes feels a little slow to respond and there doesn't seem to be any way to make diving shots but overall the controls feel good. It will take you a few sets just to get used to the way the player moves though. In the full version, you can go on a World Tour against 3000 players in 300 tournaments evolving over a period of 36 years, with a complete double-ranking system in Single and Double competitions. In addition, there are 6 difficulty levels, each split in 10 sub-levels with full ATP style ranking system. Finally, the attention to detail even includes 9 different surfaces : clay, green clay, grass, hard, blue-green hard, classic synthetic, NewLine synthetic, indoor hard and indoor synthetic, each with a specific rebound.
If you don't want to play against the computer generated opponents, there is a LAN mode to play against friends elsewhere. The main downside of Tennis Elbow however is that there are only two configurable characters. It's a shame the developers didn't have the rights to include the real names of players but for a small developer, the licensing costs would be too expensive.
Tennis Elbow 2011 is an excellent tennis game that will have you going back for more long after you install it.
