Outlaw Tennis review

Tennis fans have always loved bad boys - though they usually draw the line at actual beatings, wimps that they are. What we’ve got here is a pretty decent tennis game with added “street” or “extreme” bits. In the same way that Outlaw Golf could best be described as Tiger Woods after a night spent with Kid Rock in Vegas, ingesting suspicious substances and trying to choose your favorite lady of the night, Outlaw Tennis is Virtua Tennis if it arrived to the court on a Harley carrying a racket strung with barbed wire.

The graphics are solid (though some among us will maintain that the girls should look “hotter”), and the courts blend the sublime: a soot-caked, torch-lit venue that could be Beelzebub’s basement, and the ridiculous: a court made entirely of ice and snow which makes winning a rally as easy as learning Lebanese over your lunch hour. There are several gameplay variations as well, ranging from moving barriers to exploding tennis balls and beyond. Some work better than others, but it’s definitely not typical tennis.