Tennis Manager 2022 Review - A Smash for Hardcore Tennis Fans

Tennis can be a lonely sport, especially when you’re thoroughly outclassed by an opponent and you know it from the very first serve. In the midst of a match where the result is practically a foregone conclusion, you’d rather be anywhere but on that court suffering through a humiliating defeat. Tennis Manager 2022, from French developer and publisher Rebound CG, offers the ability to relieve you of that burden. Instead, you become the support system by training them so that they can hopefully never feel that alone when they’re competing in any tournament. As the game shifts the focus to building an entire academy full of talent, the scope broadens to place less of an importance on every single point and more on investing in a winner that sees consistently solid results over the span of a player’s career. With that said, like any good tennis manager would, let’s jump into my Tennis Manager 2022 review so we can run this game through some exercises and drills to assess its strengths and weaknesses.

Tennis Manager 2022 Review

A small disclaimer up front: While I have loads of experience with tennis games, I don’t have a ton of experience playing any manager-style sport games like Football Manager that remove control of your player(s) during the action. This also means I did not play the original Tennis Manager 2021 game that preceded this one.

That said, Tennis Manager 2022 offers a unique perspective of the sport that provides enough ways to mold your players and keep up-to-date on their progress over time to keep things interesting. The game’s tutorials do a lot of heavy lifting in explaining how various aspects of your preparation can affect their progress, and there’s the option of taking the reins as much or as little as you like as the months and years pass. The downside, as you might expect from a game where you don’t swing the racket yourself, is that the graphics and physics are lacking compared to other tennis titles. The customization for creating your manager and player is a little thin as well, making it difficult to have anyone stand out in any tangible way.

What I Like

Academy Training Options

If you’re not going to be able to compete in any of the matches in a game like this, then you better be able to contribute in a whole lot of other ways and, for the most part, Tennis Manager 2022 delivers on this front. Aside from the obvious of selecting which tournaments to enter while trying to climb the rankings boards, you’ll also have to be concerned about setting an optimal training regimen for your players, building new training facilities, hiring staff, negotiating endorsement contracts, and keeping an eye on the financials to be sure you’re actually making money at the end of the day. Most of these involve laying low and pulling the strings behind the scenes, but there are the rare times when you get your moment in the spotlight, even if these only involve choosing the best answers in press conferences or interviews with magazines. While certain duties might be more exciting than others, there’s at least plenty to do to keep yourself busy and be concerned about as you juggle the careers of young phenoms and hardened veterans.

If you choose to attend matches rather than simply simulating them and being updated on the result, you’re naturally confined to watching the match from the stands where you’ll be limited in what you can do to affect the outcome. Prior to any match, you’ll be able to impart some words of wisdom to the player you manage by choosing from a selection of speeches that range from generic words of encouragement to some funny lines designed to cut the tension. It must be said that something seems to have been lost in translation with a few of these phrases because they don’t sound like anything that someone who speaks English as their primary language would ever say. All you can do once the match begins is shout some things out occasionally to your player and hope for a good reaction or have a short talk with them following a set. It can be more impactful though to try changing your player’s game plan during a match when things aren’t going well to see if switching things up can swing the momentum.

Clothing And Equipment

There isn’t a ton that you can do when creating a manager or a player (more on that later), but thanks to partnerships with real companies, there’s a lot of clothing and equipment that you can wear to have your player looking and performing their best. In fact, signing contracts with these companies so that you wear their brand of shoes or use their brand of racket is a fine way to make a little money while adding some style and finesse to your player’s game. With companies like Asics, Wilson and Lacoste represented, you’ll be able to work with some of the most reputable names in tennis as you become a bigger draw in the sport (providing your player is marketable enough).

The shoes and racket that your player uses serve more than just a cosmetic purpose too, as these can give you attribute boosts in categories like backhand power and footwork respectively. They all have their cons as well though, so it’s important to try to choose equipment that can either maximize your player’s strengths or to help cover up for their weaknesses.

Statistics And Attributes

Another area where you would expect any management game to excel is in statistics, and Tennis Manager 2022 thankfully has an abundance of them. These give you the opportunity to keep closer tabs on your player’s progress by analyzing how they’ve performed recently, as well as over their entire career. You can always look back over previous matches and view the breakdown of how it played out to see if there are any trends that you might be able to correct by adjusting training routines or perhaps altering your player’s game plan in matches.

The preponderance of statistics extends to the attributes players develop that determine how they will perform against their opponent, which include the expected ratings for a variety of physical skills alongside an assessment of your player’s mood and shape. A helpful briefing before every match will give you a snapshot of where an adversary’s strengths and weaknesses lie, and this can hold clues for how you might want to alter your player’s approach to give them the best chance of success.

What I Don’t Like

Graphics & Presentation

Admittedly, it’s not expected that the graphics in any manager-style games like this are going to be able to approach other titles where it’s more of a concern since you’ll be responsible for controlling the competitors involved, but it still feels a little underwhelming whenever you try to sit through a match in Tennis Manager 2022. The player models, which use the tried-and-true method of skirting a lack of licensing by representing real players with approximate likenesses and slightly altered names, are blocky and rather clunky in their movements.

The physics are even worse though, as players will swing their rackets and send the ball flying over the net back to their opponent, but the collision of racket meeting ball never quite lines up with when the ball changes direction. The atmosphere at venues is pretty non-descript and muted, but it’s appreciated how you can view the match from a few different angles. It all adds up to a package that will likely have you reaching for the fast forward button a lot during matches to get to the final outcome and that’s at least somewhat part of the game’s design.

Lack Of Customization

When creating the look for your manager, it’s disappointing to find that all you can do is select from a bunch of photographs of random people rather than having a creation suite where you’re able to sculpt their individual features yourself. There’s only slightly more in the way of customization when you create a tennis player to lead to greatness, as you can switch hair style and skin tone, but no matter what else you modify, there’s no changing the same face underneath it all. The equipment and clothing that you earn through endorsement deals helps offset the lack of individuality in the face department, but the limitations are glaring among other sports games (and tennis titles even) that give you deeper editing capabilities on more of your created player’s physical features.

Bottom Line

For hardcore tennis fans, Tennis Manager 2022 will fulfill any grandiose dreams of building your own tennis academy and developing a stable of talent that hopefully will produce a champion or two over the years. Its strength is in the extensive menus, where you can navigate through a plethora of screens that all have options that can influence the trajectory of either your academy as a whole or that of a specific player. The real brands that you can sign contracts with help to add some authenticity to the experience and allow you to transform each player into someone with their own particular flair. There’s an abundance of attributes for each player that facilitate different styles of play and no shortage of statistics that you can view for players and for matches that have happened.

The downside is that there’s a sacrifice in the visuals, where the on-court back-and-forth lags behind other titles graphically, though this is to be anticipated in a way since the game almost expects you to fast-forward through portions of matches anyway to get through the grueling calendar of events more quickly. The ability to create your own player is marred considerably by the lack of a proper creation suite and has all of the players and managers you create looking way too similar to each other. The cycle of training and entering tournaments alongside toggling between the array of menu screens will likely become tedious and redundant more quickly to those who only casually enjoy tennis.