Xbox tennis game is a racket

TOP SPIN 4

RATING E for Everyone

For Top Spin 4, online play was the highlight, thanks to match search menus that allowed us to find opponents quickly. We chose Ivan Lendl's character for our first foray in online head-to-head play, hoping a bit of his signature crushing forehand would lead us to victory. The result? We lost 0-6, 0-6 to someone online playing as Roger Federer.

Top Spin 4 delivers the tennis strokes on the release of the controller buttons to the right, while the player movement is dictated by the thumb stick on the left. Time it right and the word "perfect" appears in green letters. But when we waited too long to swing, those late hits lacked the power to pin my opponent to the back of the court.

We trudged off in search of another match, this time playing as Bjorn "The Iceman" Borg, a personal favorite. No way we could lose with those looping, heavy topspin ground strokes, right?

Wrong again. We lost 4-21 in a so-called "super tiebreaker" (first player to score 21 points) to Serena Williams. Williams' character serves extremely well in this game and poor Borg was left guessing with his returns.

The offline career mode can be toggled to go quickly, or take an eternity with regular scoring selected for best-of-three set matches. The graphics are passable, but nothing we hadn't seen before. -- AP