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Stick Tennis Tour (iOS) game review

Stick Tennis Tour iPhone game review: We hit the courts for this sequel to Stick Tennis on iOS, a simple yet addictive freemium game that’s out now on Apple’s App Store.

Although we liked Stick Tennis from Stick Sports Ltd, it had a few little issues including some pesky game-breaking bugs. Thankfully the developers have overhauled and improved the game and released it in a fresh new form, Stick Tennis Tour, which is out now for your iPhone.

Gameplay is still nice and simple. Your player runs around the court automatically, leaving you free to concentrate on smashing the ball back at your opponent. You do so with a quick swipe in the direction you wish to aim the ball, but you also have to time your swipe right in order to get plenty of power on the return. Thankfully there’s now a quick tutorial when you first start the game, which teaches you the basic strategies you’ll need to advance.

As well as the standard exhibition campaign, you can also participate in daily challenges. These are essentially just six-set matches against random opponents (at least as far as we’ve seen), which is a shame – we’d have liked a bit more variety. Stuff like ‘you’re five sets down, try to bring it back and win the match’.

After every match, your energy levels will dwindle and if they fall too far, your game will start to suffer. Energy regenerates over time, but in true freemium style you can of course purchase energy drinks or watch ads to avoid a pause in play. You’ll also find ads popping up between matches, which can be skipped after a few seconds.

The freemium model stretches to new equipment too, so you can splash out a few quid on new shoes and racquets to boost your stats if you don’t want to grind to improve. We’d rather just pay a couple of quid for the game and have the gear unlocked as you play, but it’s up to you whether you spend your cash to give yourself an edge.

All of Stick Tennis’ bugs appear to have been ironed out and we didn’t see any crashes or other issues, which was a great relief. The game feels a lot more polished, offering up a solid challenge if you don’t simply fork out cash from the off. Those 30-shot rallies are tense as hell and winning a match by the skin of your teeth is genuinely rewarding.

You can grab Stick Tennis Tour right now on the App Store.

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