Grand Slam Tennis User Manual

This game has some really entertaining game play/mechanics, looking at it strictly from the standpoint of what you do when you're in a match.This game has some really entertaining game play/mechanics, looking at it strictly from the standpoint of what you do when you're in a match. The controls strike a good balance between simplicity and sophistication.* The commentary is entertaining, if a little repetitive over time. It can be fun to play.

And that's where my positives end, because for whatever time EA Sports spent in game mechanics, they seemingly spent no time whatsoever in the orchestration of the user experience across the different modes and usage patterns. Here are some examples of how the user experience off the court completely falls down.

The navigation through screens, modes, transitions, etc., is quite simply the worst and most unintuitive I've used in a game in as long as I can remember. Navigation options are often incredibly difficult to decipher, based on their descriptions (i.e. "Okay, so what to I click on now?"), and most of the time, once you do figure them out, don't make any real sense at all from an intuitiveness standpoint. And the accompanying help screens? EA, you may as well have just written "TODO" on each page of documentation, for all of the lack of value of the sparse information presented. Simply awful, not production quality at all. Somebody-should-be-fired awful. It took quite a while of playing and navigating, with trial and error, to figure out what you should and shouldn't do.

The career mode is unbelievably unrealistic and decidedly unrewarding. The first two years of your career are a total cakewalk. I lost one match in the entire 24 months of play. Then I stepped into the first match of the third year, and couldn't take more than a game from the lowest chump on the ladder. There's a complete disconnect and inconsistency in CPU player experience, from match to match.