Every so often a new sport gains traction. It usually starts as a casual hobby activity, but then people being people find a way to make it competitive, and before you know it sponsors and organisations get involved and BAM, you’ve got a professional sport. The challenge these emerging sports always have is in gaining mainstream acceptance outside of the existing fans. Video games are a good way to try and find new audiences. Sadly for the growing Pickleball sport, the only takeaway that people are going to have from PPA Pickleball Tour 2025 is that this is a deeply unserious sport for rejects that never made it in table tennis or tennis.
It is a sport that has merit, of course. Every sport has merit. Pickleball does sit somewhere between table tennis and tennis, being played on a large court, but with racquets that look very much like large table tennis paddles. The speed of the game also resembles the twitchy nature of table tennis. It’s quite the thing to watch, and that’s probably why it’s the fastest-growing sport in the US.
You get none of that out of PPA Pickleball Tour, which instead plays like a painfully clumsy tennis game. The basics are all there, in that you can angle shots, hit lobs and drop volleys, and take risky shots that aim closer to the line with more power, but have the risk of it going out.
As basic as these mechanics are, there are such massive issues with how PPA Pickleball Tour plays, and I do wonder if this was originally meant to be a tennis game before the developers at FarSight secured the PPA license. The collision detection is basically non-existent. Balls will fly back at you that your opponent’s swing should never have reached. However, if you imagine that the player was holding a tennis racquet, with the additional reach offered by it, then the hit detection starts to make sense. Nonetheless, this issue makes the game borderline unplayable, as it becomes very difficult to tell whether you need to even prepare for a shot, especially during the quick volley exchanges, which are a frequent feature of pickleball.
Even if you can look past that, the sport itself translates into a fairly limited video game. The courts are small, reducing the range of angles and tactics of proper tennis. Matches are shorter than tennis too, so there’s no reason to have stamina play a role. The biggest addition to what you’d find in a standard tennis game is a little QTE-style minigame that kicks off when both you and your opponent are exchanging volleys at a net, but there’s not nearly enough time to respond to the button inputs with this before the game registers it as a “miss” so actually playing with this is an exercise in frustration.
Even if the game was an absolute delight to play, however, it’s so limited in every other way that you’ll only get a few hours of play out of it. PPA Pickleball Tour is horrifically ugly to look at, with some of the worst character models I’ve ever seen, and a complete lack of atmosphere on-court due to tiny crowd sizes (if you’re on a court with stands at all. The game is also one of the most limited sports games that I’ve ever played. It’s licensed, sure, to a bunch of athletes that almost no one will recognise, let alone care about. Do you know who Ben Johns is? No? That’s right. He may be #1 in the world, but it’s not quite the draw of having Rafael Nadal or Cristiano Ronaldo in the game.
Rather than be able to play as Johns, I would have preferred a career mode that was a bit more in-depth than being able to choose a tournament, play it, and… that’s it. This is particularly galling given that the only other mode is Quick Play, with all of seventeen athletes, two courts, and no online option. You can play local multiplayer, but if you subject this to your friends, you don’t deserve them.
Niche sports are difficult. Sports are always complex, demanding things to code, and everyone expects their favourite sport to get the FIFA treatment. That level of experience is just not possible with an audience as limited as Pickleball is. However, it’s not unreasonable to expect the game to at least try to look and feel like the real sport. PPA Pickleball Tour 2025 doesn’t even come close.
