Game Overview
For us, like a lot of the country, Tennis only stands out once a year, Wimbledon! Thousands of Tennis mad fans pile to the London grass court venue to watch the likes of Henman, Federa, Williams and Sharapova battle it out in an attempt to win the most prestigious grand slam in the Tennis calendar. So it seems appropriate that we review Virtua Tennis 3 in the run up to the 2007 tournament in a months time.

The first thing you'll notice about Virtua Tennis 3 is the very fancy graphics, the players look extremely lifelike and the courts and stadiums look ace! (No pun intended!) Obviously when you see graphics this nice you almost expect them to be covering something up, in Virtua Tennis 3 the only thing it's covering is the sound.

The music that accompanies the game is quite frankly, awful. During menus, navigation and in game you can never get away from the dreadful rock sounding music and trust us on this one, it really gets annoying. The best option is to turn the sound down and listen to your own tunes! Other than that though the actual sound effects like ball impact and player "grunts" sound very good indeed and the echo in certain courts sounds really good.

In game you'll need to play through the career in order to gain any achievements. It's quite a long and tiring process and can be quite repetitive at times but the amount of achievements that are dished out make it all worth while. Once you have created your character it is then time to train him up, get him/her to the practice courts and work on their stats by playing various mini games i.e. Pin Crusher where you have to knock over as many pins as possible with a serve or Avalanche which improves your footwork by having to dodge massive tennis balls and collect fruit rolling down a slope. The mini games are there to provide a bit of variety in the career mode however by the time you get to level 4 or 5 on them they start getting pretty tricky and you'll find yourself forgetting about them and looking for the next tournament to play in to try and work your way up the rankings.

Online is very much a different kettle of fish, you'll whiz through the career mode and get to within the top 100 before it starts becoming challenging at all where as online you are up against the best in the world. Games can sometimes take a while to connect and the online menus aren't all that easy to navigate through but once you get into the game it should be smooth running although we have found the game does suffer from a bit of lag once in a while which can be a bit of a pain. Remember one thing, no matter how good you think you are at the game there is always someone better and that is very true when it comes to Virtua Tennis, some players you'll beat, some will whoop you from pillar to post and not let you get a single point let alone game!

Our Conclusions
There are a couple of Tennis titles available on the 360 at the moment with Virtua Tennis going up against Top Spin 2. Virtua Tennis gives you a lot more of an arcade feel and keeps you a bit more on your toes than Top Spin 2. VT3 is a good game and shouldn't be underestimated, Sega have turned out another winner and we for one like it a lot.

Overall Score: 8/10

Thanks to Sega