The Maxim of the sports-gaming market, the Outlaw game series goes after the Clearasil crowd by making an aggressive appeal to their raging hormones and unrefined senses of humor, not to mention their light wallets. Planting a stink bomb down the stuffed shirts of officially licensed titles, the Outlaw games have the eye-popping surfaces of Pamela Anderson posters: Scantily clad vixens who accessorize like trailer-trash Barbie dolls, anti-heroes in the form of tattooed thugs or colorful ethnic stereotypes, WWE-style introductions, gratuitous fistfights, and an anti-PC streak that borders on reactionary. But after an hour of picking fights and drooling over cyber-flesh, the cut-scenes and snarky commentary begin repeating themselves, so there's only the game itself left to draw interest over the long haul. By that standard, Outlaw Tennis, the third sport in the series after Outlaw Golf and Outlaw Volleyball, holds up better than might be expected, thanks to the surprising breadth and variety of the gameplay.
Embracing its arcade aesthetic, Outlaw Tennis bucks just about every convention of real-world tennis save for a ball and a racquet, and even those options can vary. Rather than meticulously scaled stadium backdrops, the matches take place everywhere from an aircraft carrier to a slaughterhouse to Hell, where Satan presides over a lava-lined center court. The 16 players comprise a Benetton ad pumped up by steroids and implants, with hotties like Summer (a stripper with an interest in nuclear physics) and Shawnee (a Native American who screams "Sacagawea!" when a point doesn't go her way) balanced out by thugs and clowns like Vinny (a would-be gangster) and Ice Trey (an Eminem-type with a pit bull that's constantly attacking his groin). Though the drills are a clever diversion and essential to build up each character's skill points, the heart of the game is the tour mode, which runs deeper than expected. Since tennis remains a pretty rudimentary game, the makers of Outlaw Tennis have devised quirky point systems, wacky obstacles like a roving shot blocker and exploding balls, and even some inclement weather to spruce things up.