AO International Tennis

I'll be straight with you: I'm a shooter guy by trade, and I came into this one cold. But a tennis game is still a competitive, reaction-based, timing-heavy experience, and those principles translate. What I found in AO International Tennis is a title that arrived with serious ambition, got beaten up by its own launch, and then patched its way into something passable but never great. The shot system is genuinely interesting on paper. You have six shot types to work with - flat, topspin, slice, drop, lob, and smash - mapped across face buttons or the right stick depending on your preference. Timing is the core mechanic: hold a button too long or release too early and the shot misfires, which creates a real skill gap between mashing and reading the rally. A stamina system layers on top of that, rewarding well-timed hits with a brief boost. The problem is that player movement undercuts all of it. The semi-automatic positioning, where the game decides when your player will and won't sprint or react, strips out a lot of the agency that makes a competitive sports game feel fair. When the AI decides you aren't worth running for a wide ball, you lose the point and your controller's goodwill simultaneously. The career mode has real depth on paper: start at the bottom of the world rankings and grind your way up through events toward the Australian Open, managing fatigue and training along the way. The licensed rod Laver Arena looks the part, and the AI for the handful of licensed pros (Rafael Nadal and Angelique Kerber lead a roster of roughly twenty players) is built on a decade of ball-tracking data, which makes their tendencies feel more grounded than you'd expect. That said, Federer, Djokovic, Murray, and Serena Williams are all absent, which stings hard for anyone expecting a full pro roster. The community creation suite does some heavy lifting here: the PlayFace and Stadium Creator tools are legitimately impressive, and the online sharing ecosystem means you can download community-built versions of missing players if you're willing to spend time in menus. Online play is where I have the most concerns for anyone buying today. At launch, matchmaking was broken enough that crashes were routine. Post-patch reports suggested the netcode itself was clean when a match actually connected, but finding opponents was a waiting game. With a game from 2018 and a successor (AO Tennis 2) already out, the active online population is almost certainly thin. Doubles mode was famously broken at launch and did get fixed through patches, but again, getting a live doubles match going in 2025 is a matter of luck. If you have a friend who owns this, local co-op or a private online session is where the value lives now. The atmosphere is flat in ways that compound over time. No commentary during rallies, a crowd that barely reacts until a point ends, and surface differences (hard, clay, grass) that are cosmetic rather than mechanical. For a game positioning itself as a sim, the lack of meaningful surface behavior is a significant omission. Critics averaged around 51 out of 100 on OpenCritic, and that number feels about right: not broken enough to be unplayable if you want the genre, not good enough to compete with the Top Spin pedigree that players still reference when they want to explain what a tennis game should feel like.

Fred · Scout Team

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