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Ever fancied grunting and sweating your way to the top of the tennis circuit? Well, now you can with Pro Tennis Tour 2. Sport sims have always been popular - tennis especially - and Pro Tennis Tour 2 is a very well-produced version featuring a 3D court and 3D player sprites. You can coach your player through friendlies or practise with the ball machine before taking on the ultimate challenge, the grand slam.

After a pleasant piece of digitised music you're presented with some less-than-pleasing chip music and the main menu. From here you can access a wealth of options. You or your ST can control up to four players, each with individual characteristics - but you need a special adapter (there are several on the market) if more than two of you want to play.

You can choose the sex of your players - boys with blue rackets and girls with pink - but if you want to play mixed doubles you need to have at least 1Mbyte of memory. You can adjust the strengths of various strokes and there are options to save and load players later on.

After a few games you really begin to identify with your player's struggle to reach the top. The joystick control of your player is straightforward, but can take a while to master. First, you must move your player into the position you want to take a shot from. When you press the Fire button, the player stops moving and prepares to play the ball. The longer you hold the button down, the harder the shot. At the same time you can move the joystick to determine the direction of the stroke. Release the button and you make your shot. This control method makes it possible to chip, lob and smash as well as place the shot - ideally as far away from your opponent as possible.

To ease you into the game a junior option enables you to concentrate on hitting the ball while your ST moves you around. Frustration can set in as your opponent blasts ace after ace past you. The game comes into its own when decent rallies get going and you start to wrench the joystick around desperately trying to return the little yellow ball. The trick is to place your player for the return while keeping your eye on the ball. As in real tennis, players change ends and service, although they don't get any barley water in between.

The fixed perspective view of the court doesn't lend itself to flashy graphics routines, but a lot of effort has gone into the presentation. The 3D effect is excellent - the graphics are slick and the sprites generally move around smoothly.

Great use is made of sampled effects - each game opens with a ripple of applause, the umpire calls "Fault!" a lot and if you have 1MByte you even get the score read out. The menu screens could be better and the chip music soon has you reaching for the volume control. Overall, though, the effects complement the gameplay very well.

Pro Tennis Tour 2 is a highly polished simulation. The initial difficulties controlling your played soon give way to addiction as you battle for every point. Even if sport sims aren't your bag, this is worth checking out. When you've mastered the ST-controlled opponents, you can try and thrash your friends.

It's a game that grows with your skill and should have you coming back for more when you've tired of your shoot-'em-ups.