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Asriel on 24 June 2018
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I've spent about 3 hours on Aces and I can only categorise it as disappointing. While it's an improvement over Ultra Smash, improving over such a poor effort isn't difficult. What's baffling is Nintendo and Camelot have enough content and variety in the game to make it more interesting, but by restricting options and keeping modes quite shallow, it's really off-putting. There are three single-player tournaments, for example, versus 10 tournaments with 5 difficulty modes in the latest Mario Kart - or 8 different Tournaments which featured different courts and rules in Mario Power Tennis on the GameCube (which also featured a much more straightforward 'Exhibition' mode for free-play and local multiplayer as well as a bunch of mini-games). To be blunt, despite the solid online, interesting mechanics and strong visuals and animations, Aces feels unpolished, stingy and cheap in places.

- There's a dearth of single-player content. I've done two of the three tournaments in 30 minutes and three fifths of the adventure mode in 90 minutes. There might be 3-4 hours of play across Adventure mode and single-player Tournaments.
- Menus and music are cheap. The same handful of music tracks for every mode and match.
- Limited options for local multiplayer and single-player. Why isn't choosing a court more straightforward? Why are there so few tournaments? Why no doubles tournaments? Or a tournament for each court? Why am I limited to either tie-breaker or two set matches offline? No local multiplayer tournament options?

The online is good and has worked well in my experience, the characters feel meaningfully different when playing as them, and it looks great and maintains a rocksteady 60fps. Some of the different courts look great, too. On top of the core game though, bland music, poor menus and limited choice really hold the game back for me. With the content already in the game it would be easy to fix these issues with patches:

- Allow local multiplayer tournaments.
- Allow greater customisation of tournaments - i.e. you can choose the number of games/sets for each round.
- Allow greater customisation of rules in Free Play, Swing Mode and online matches v friends.
- Add Doubles Tournaments and a tournaments that use different courts to pad out the dedicated single-player options. As noted, this has fewer than half the Tournament options that Power Tennis had on GC despite the number of characters and courts being broadly comparable.
- Fix the menus so that choosing rules and courts is done in a far more logical and coherent manner in different modes.
- Patch in more options to pause menus, such as a 'Restart' option in Adventure mode, and a quick restart if you fail an Adventure mode challenge.

This game could have done with more time in the oven. Given characters seemingly already in the game are being held back as a reward for playing in online tournaments, I can only hope Camelot are planning on patching and fleshing out the game in other ways.