Top Spin 4

Sitting alongside your schooling about the various hidden benefits of player attributes is how to build your character. It's important to decide what kind of player you want to build for the game's all-important career mode.

As before you'll earn XP for winning matches and tournaments, but the way the game handles your evolution has been modified to funnel players down more logical paths of progression.

Rather than simply leaving it up to the player to assign their XP how they see fit, Top Spin 4 bundles XP into 'packages'. "It was too complicated before, now it's clearer, so every time you go up a level you have a choice over a package - for example, Serve and Volley, Offensive Baseline Play, or Defensive Baseline Play, and you shepherd a character that's good at doing something - and not just improving abstract parameters. You're getting better at a certain way of playing."

As before, you can only level up to a certain degree to ensure that you can never build the perfect player. "It's impossible to have a player who is 100 per cent everywhere - you have to decide on your strengths and weaknesses," explains Dupas.

Another tweak to the Top Spin 4 career mode is the new emphasis on coaches. As in real life, the significance of a change of coach can make all the difference, and Top Spin 4 introduces the ability to hire and fire bronze, silver or gold-rated tutors - something we'll be interested in checking out when the review version turns up in the coming weeks.

We're told that rather than enter into arbitrary coaching sessions, your coach will ask you to perform certain objectives as you play, such as 10 aces, 55 advanced serves, 75 power shots, 90 balls with good timing and 13 annoyed retorts at the umpire (we may have made the last one up). Once you meet your targets, you'll unlock bonus attributes such as the enticingly titles 'Serve Stick Berserker' that presumably gives you raging power and precision.

One thing that hasn't changed a great deal, though, is the licensing side of the game. It features 25 top current and legendary professionals culled from the male and female game, including Becker and Borg for those of you old enough to remember playing Match Point on the ZX Spectrum.

Sadly licensed venues appear to be outside of the budget. But given the quality and variety of the ones on offer, few will shed tears about that side of things. Motion control is also confirmed for Move, but anyone hoping for Kinect support will be disappointed ("How are you going to move around?" Dupas asks).

What's important is that Top Spin 4 is looking great in every respect. Finally it appears to be on the point of reaching balance between depth and intuition that we've craved since the first game appeared. Gone are the nonsensical novelties and with a bit of luck, in comes a well-crafted evolution of everything we liked about the series.