Tennis Clash：Sports Stars Game 12+

I’ve been playing this game for over a year. You can in theory play for free, there are no ads and the gameplay is very good. So it’s a great game. It was even better before they introduced rapid stamina depletion! It’s still good though. It’s easy to get hooked on the ‘need’ to upgrade so you can be stronger and win more, and that’s the rub, it’s actually very difficult to continue to progress past tour 3 without paying for upgrades, in fact, unless you are an excellent player, you're likely to run out of coins especially if you try to progress too quickly. The key is actually to progress really slowly so you can build up a reserve of coins and upgrade your player before moving on to the next tournament level. You need to maintain a win rate of over 50% or you’ll run out of coins. If you can ignore the desire to upgrade, and/or pay for some stuff, then this game will serve you well. I’ve spent about £75 in all, and that’s ok for over a year of play. It does eventually start to get a bit tedious on the upgrade side because once you’ve maxed out your original features it’s terribly slow to upgrade to better ones, even if you want to pay, the things you want to buy come up so rarely it’s desperately slow or ridiculously expensive, so opening bags becomes a chore cos there’s nothing you want in them. Nonetheless, the game play is excellent, far more sophisticated than you might realise to begin with, and on the whole the match matching is pretty good.

This game starts of as pretty great and is very addictive....offering fun gameplay and a bit of a challenge. It soon becomes clear you probably need a few paid packs to stay competitive. No big deal, if you don’t mind spending a little. Seemed worth it to me as I was enjoying it so much.
So you crack on and increase your power for a while....then you just seem to hit a wall. Around tier 4, the matchmaking system falls apart....regularly matching you against people with double or even triple your power level. You get to know as soon as you see them appear that the match is going to be impossible to win. No matter what you do, even hitting perfect shots....their stats are so far above yours that they hit everything back easily and even their bad shots beat you. It becomes very rare to find an evenly matched game at tier 4.
There is no way around this for us, as the only option is to buy more packs at stupid prices...and actually even the expensive packs will do nothing, or almost nothing to increase your power level. I could go spend £1000 on packs and the fundamental problem would still be the same.
If the developers can fix the matchmaking and make packs actually offer upgrades for a reasonable cost, then it might be worth playing and maybe even spending a little money on.....otherwise, honestly, you are gonna end up throwing your phone half way across the room in frustration , wondering why you wasted so much freakin’ time on this game!!

The hard hit function interferes with the close page swipe up action on the iPhone... so when you go for a killer hard shot the app closes and you loose the point ... ditto at serve in some games. It’s frustrating at higher levels when real money or large stakes are involved.. or maybe it’s a way to get us to pay more money... if you’re playing with Lvl 7 or higher players and lvl 10 cards it’s just idiotic that the app behaves like this and you loose games you’re 6-1 up at... fix it, I’m not paying any more money!
Equally, fix your servers… I use 4bar 4G on my phone or super fast WiFi broadband when home… it still fluctuates and closes the app suddenly. This is most frustrating on the serve where even if your app closes even for a second and you manage to reopen it you find you’ve lost at least a point. The connection bar above players heads randomly appears, obviously in games that are a “must win” where ones thrown the full pack of extras at it and you’re limit up on the potential prize money… this is as frustrating as the app suddenly closing mid shot…
(I’m on a iPhone XR) …. And have come very close to throwing it across a room in frustration, not at my rubbish shots or my opponents brilliance, but the flakey connection in your servers at critical times….
Hence only two stars for what could otherwise be the best game ever for phones ….