Hot Shots Tennis takes the Hot Shots series in a whole new direction and game, this time, onto a tennis court.

The game's visuals reminded me more times than not of Wii Sports. Granted, the game doesn't use the legless Mii's that are seen on the other system, but everything from the menus to the very cartoony characters (even if they have legs) just seemed to belong on the Wii.

None of this is bad by any means. I enjoyed the bright colors and clean look of the menus, character and court. The looks of this game are one of its greatest assets.

Unlike the visuals, the sound is pretty forgettable. The music is okay, but only enough to get by. The sound effects, on the other hand, are very memorable, just not in a good way. The characters' grunts and other noises have very little variety and are heard often. Quite frankly, this got annoying fast.

As a tennis game, Hot Shots Tennis has all of the pieces that are needed for a good tennis game. There are several modes of play that let you compete in either tournaments or just one-off matches with up to four players, and a lengthy tutorial that is designed to teach you the intricacies of playing Hot Shots Tennis. Unfortunately, the execution leaves a lot to be desired.

While the game does a good job of letting the player know where the ball will be when it goes to his/her side of the court, it seems to fail when it comes to returning the volley and getting the ball to go where you want it. But that part of the discussion falls more into the realm of Game Mechanics than Gameplay, so I will talk about that later.

During matches, I found myself getting fairly flustered at little aspects of the game. The most notable would be when I would fault because I could not direct the ball into the correct area of my opponent's court. This was annoying because I really felt like this cartoony game had too much of a sim feeling than the arcade style I was expecting. It would have helped the game a whole lot if, like in Wii Tennis, a serve would end up in the correct area of the opponent's court, no matter what. This little detail, along with several others, built up into enough of an annoyance to where, several times, I felt like I couldn't really get anywhere in the game and had to put it away.

Hot Shots Tennis is a hard game. Unfortunately, this is more due to the game's mechanics and lack of any real feel of control. As far as CPU-controlled opponents are concerned, there seems to be a good bit of variety in skills. Some people are better at returning your serves than others and some have more precision than others. Unfortunately, because of the control issues, it's really hard for you make any real kind of progress in the modes that involve going up against computer-controlled players.

What this does mean is that pretty much any human player will be evenly matched with any other human player... that's not necessarily a bad thing, but it isn't all that great.

From what I was able to work out of Hot Shots Tennis' controls, when returning the ball to your opponent's side of the court, the ball would go in some odd combination of the direction your character is facing, which direction you hold down when you actually hit the ball and how accurate your timing is. On top of that, you will hit the ball different ways depending on which face button you tap.

Even with the use of the game's tutorial, getting the hang of this system is really hard to do and not all that intuitive. After several hours of play and attempts to get a hold of the controls, it still felt clumsy. This is a noticeable contrast to other similar games like Rockstar Table Tennis which did a really good job of working the complex spins into a simple control.

In the end, I wouldn't really recommend Hot Shots Tennis to even avid tennis players/gamers because of its uncomfortable controls and consequently, its lack of precision and accuracy.