Last updated on November 19th, 2025 at 06:52 pm
Retro Slam Tennis – Sports Game Review
Retro Slam Tennis is a Sports/Roleplaying game from New Star Games, first launched in 24th February 2025.
It’s rated 12+ and currently has 282+ ratings on the App Store.
What Makes Retro Slam Tennis Stand Out
Get ready to be the next tennis sensation! Work your way up the ranks and strive to be the world's best player. Compete on hard, clay and grass courts, hire coaches and complete their challenges, manage relationships with friends and family, acquire sponsors, buy luxury items, buy equipment, chug a can of NRG (or two) and oh – don't forget about your social media followers! Retro Slam Tennis is a full-on role-playing experience where if you work hard and hone your skills then you can be the "new star" in world tennis!
This Sports game offers engaging gameplay and regular updates for mobile players.
Player Feedback
As a newer release, Retro Slam Tennis is building its player community. Early feedback suggests .
Recent Updates & Development
Latest Update: 4th August 2025
Recent improvements include:
- Fixed an issue related to checking challenges for season prize money.
- Fixed being able to hit the ball again after a low powered shot.
- Fixed seeing pre-determined tour points being awarded on the Race screen.
- Fixed post final tour points not being allocated correctly for CPU runner-up.
Download & Availability
Retro Slam Tennis is available through the official App Store for iOS devices.
Get Retro Slam Tennis on App Store
Requirements: Requires iPhone 5s / iPad Air / iPad Air (Cellular) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina, Cellular) / iPhone 6 / iPhone 6 Plus / iPad Air 2 / iPad Air 2 (Cellular) / iPad Mini 3 or later.
Compatible with iPhone and iPad devices.
Player Experience Highlights
Community Insight:
This is a really fun game especially for people who like tennis, we enjoy playing this game and its a really insane game.
BEST TENNIS GAME EVER SO MUCH DEPTH.
Ive loved retro bowl and retro bowl college, and this game really captures both engaging gameplay and a great management aspect that isnt all there in the football games. Great balance, and hopefully you guys make a basketball game soon.
Impressionante como o povo limitado que no sabe jogar um jogo tambm no sabe avali-lo, a avaliao aqui serve para dizer se o jogo vem feito e divertido e no se voc no consegue jog-lo, porque extremamente limitado. Dito isso, jogo excelente, com todo o calendrio da ATP, muito divertido e fcil de aprender.
Really bizarre to hear anyone doesnt love this. Love the authenticity with the real tour and locations, the steadiness of the players in the rankings, game play is great. Theres only a couple things we wish it would fix: 1000 level events should be 2/3 set matches for men like the ATP tour. Could help the calendar go a little faster and save some energy, but more than anything, add more authenticity. More colors for the outfits!! Theres so much nuance to how you can customize the uniforms in the retro football games, Id like to see that here. Also maybe options for sleeves/sleeveless, hats/headbands, socks, armbands etc. Making all the characters more customizable would really add a lot of flair. Would also love it each event kept your full history there. Its nice you can see how many times youve won at a certain tournament but knowing the places where youve never made it out of the 2/3rd round or whatever it is would be interesting since you lose track after awhile. Likewise would love to see what the H2H with other players are before a match starts, what the total H2H vs Finals vs Majors etc. That would be very interesting since you wind up facing the same people in similar situations a lot. We could see how it might be a tall order but adding the option to play doubles in some tournaments would be very cool! Would make balancing energy a little harder, but you could also make more money. Youd probably have to maintain a relationship with your doubles partner and they could leave you if its bad. Would be a fun option for early on in the career to help boost exp, etc. Not sure how the gameplay would work but Id love to see it. Likewise, having quallies seems like it would be difficult to do accurately for early in the career but if it keeps developing that would be really cool. Would also be cool if every 4 years the Olympics popped up??? If the original retro bowl can keep track of wildcards and contracts the Olympics seems doable. Also maybe adding more pages of the shop since it feels like you blow through it really quickly when you play a full career. Cant wait to see what you guys do next.
Best tennis game on the App Store. New Star continues to never disappoint. Suggestion for the developers- we wish you could be able to see your record against the player you are about to play. Our second suggestion would be to see the bracket/draw on who one or who lost in the tournament. Hope you take these suggestions! Keep up the good work on these games.
The reviews on this game are too harshits plenty fun and enjoyable. Three things. First, there needs to be more content. An easy idea would be the addition of the Olympics, but Im sure more could be added, like doubles. Two, the game just gets too easy once you figure it out. We shouldnt be winning 98% of the events we enter. Finally, more stats would be goodhow do we stack up to the tennis greats of all time.
The game is pretty solid and very fun to play while out & about or on a car ride and our pretty much only complaint is how doing a lob shot only works 1% of the time. In training it works perfectly but in actual matches it hardly ever actually works properly, it either sends the ball wayyy to far back or wayyy to short allowing the bot to return them and half the time the bot turns into some 8ft man and doesnt allow anything to get by. But to be honest the rest of the game is fun to play.
Absolutely love this game and how it depicts the actual tennis tour. Our only problem is that 1000 events are 5 set matches which isnt accurate to the tour.
Overall good game but it doesnt make sense how the opponent can still move before you hit the ball, are they freezing time? Also the news article normally shows them downplaying and speaking negatively about your player, can we get some more positive news articles? Ive seen like one or two.
The game looks fun but when you get it, it doesnt really teach you how to play. In retro bowl we cook and usually go 18-0 and win the retro bowl. In retro slam it is sooooooo hard and it doesnt make sense.
Every match you play you will start off down. It will always favor the opponent no matter what. If you plan on downloading this to have fun, dont. You will just be mad the whole time playing it.
Its an okay game, the coin payout and NRG can price is pretty out of whack but other than that we managed to get in 3 seasons before deleting this.
Game worked smoothly for months but all of a sudden after 1 match the game goes into slow motion. It makes the match take forever and becomes unplayable. We reset the game, reset our phone it still happens.
We really like the idea and concept but having the player always at a disadvantage makes it incredibly hard to play. Also make it so we can actually play points instead of having it where if you lose the point but wont lose the game it auto loses for you instead of letting you play. Oh and make it so you can hit the ball, half the time we will miss the ball after clearly hitting it and getting a green dot on it but the game says its a miss.
We like this game but, the mechanics are terrible half the time we cant even predict where our ball will go and when we hit soft we just get smacked, fix this or esle this game is absolutely terrible.
Not anywhere near as polished as the football counterpart, this title suffers from a variety of issues that set back considerably the amount of fun you can have with it. Your player begins almost incapable of hitting the ball over the net with a full power shot, but is for whatever reason encouraged to participate in tournament play against the best players in the world. Get ready to lose repeatedly even if your shots (the only aspect of the game you have any control over) are on target, as your character is too slow to run towards the opponents ball so you end up losing. You will also be responsible for juggling happiness as a measure of how often you call your friends family and romantic interest, even though this system offers essentially no rewards and cues at the cost of playing tennis which might actually grant you the necessary experience points to make your little guy fast enough to chase down a tennis ball. We definitely understand why this game is not garnering the attention or downloads of Retro Bowl. Maybe the developer will spend more time fixing typos in the dialogue and tips screens and adjusting gameplay mechanics to feel more rewarding and improve the curve of the character scaling. Until then, youre safe not playing this title. Im now uninstalling it.
Originally we thought your player was bad because they were new. Training, while you earn points to improve only handicaps you in the long run. We made 2 toons and even with the purchased accessories. Racket, Shoes, Shorts, Shirt, and nearly maxed stats, and being ranked in the top 10 in the world, an opponent ranked 150 is outplaying us by a wide margin, a ridiculous margin. Our shots are wildly inconsistent, hitting the ball in the same spot yields 2 mind bogglingly different results. We really want to like this game, it is fun but, its also mind numbingly frustrating to lose to a player 140 spots below you consistently.
Idk how this game has bad reviews.
Ive really enjoyed playing Retro Tennis! Its surprisingly deep for a retro-style game. The gameplay is challenging in the best way, and we love how much strategy is involved from deciding when to train, rest, or play in tournaments, to managing energy and player development. The systems are well thought-out and make every choice feel important. Even though the game doesnt have official player licenses, its fun to see the familiar names with creative twists. If we could suggest a few improvements: It would be awesome to add headbands and wristbands as accessories, just for fun and visual flair. A customization feature before starting a career would be great like editing other players names and attributes or creating your own roster of fictional stars. Maybe even a manager mode for those who love the off-court side of the sport. Overall, fantastic game. Tons of replay value, and clearly made with love for tennis fans.
Ive played NSS for years, and Ive been waiting for a tennis game for the longest time. We absolutely LOVE it!!! Thank you for making that a reality.
Our favorite app of all time, going all the way back to 2013, was new star soccer. And as a tennis player, seeing the app Ive always wanted pop into existence has literally been a dream come true. The tennis gameplay itself is genius, with the ability to use real strategy and skill to defeat opponents. And, speaking of opponents, theyre pretty difficult when youre starting off, so it feels like an actual tennis career. The lifestyle/training gameplay is the standard new star games formula with coaches acting similar to agents from NSS, and lifestyle affecting public perception. Using the NSS formula on tennis is pretty daring, and while its close to perfect, there are some hiccups upon release. There are 2 major problems Ive seen: 1. Overheads should go down with top spin. In tennis, you crank them with spin, similar to a serve, so they stay in. We keep missing because the current overhead will register a miss since spin doesnt affect them. Kind of stupid to have the hardest hit shot in tennis require a soft touch to work. 2. The energy scaling in the game is unbalanced. Once you hit the higher levels, you have to be Roger Federer and win every major tournament to even afford energy drinks. Not sure what the thought process was there, but it actually makes the game almost unplayable by the time you hit top 5.
Dont trust the reviews, all the bad reviews were based off something that they fixed. The game is crazy fun and addicting and gets progressively more enjoyable.
Ive been playing New Star Games since like 2011 when New Star Soccer was on the computer and we are blown away by this one. By far our favorite entry into the series of games made, and theres so much in it.
This game has a chance to be another all timer for retro bowl team. Not a fan of the casino type stuff(romance, energy cans etc), particularly when we have to run it multiple times to get a result. We think it can work better if you just tell us the result rather than presenting as a luck based system. You can be more matter of fact about it. Rest, as opposed to energy drinks, makes more sense for energy strategy. Its a good sacrifice to get rest instead of enter a tournament where you wont be at your best, so be more punitive when energy is low. Put more emphasis on energy impact and the strategy around managing your energy, thats a cool mechanism but if we can still pretty easily win a tough tournament with zero energy the balance is off. We should have to be perfect, which probably also means improving the weighting of performance physics(when we hit the ball) with weakened stats having more impact. An energy drink should only be able to give a small temporary boost during tournaments, but never full energy. After the tournament, using energy drinks should give us a crash, so they need to be used when we must, but not when not needed. The game should be based around getting the number spot for a period of time and winning top tournaments, and it should be more difficult to obtain, the harder it is, and the more energy needs to be managed strategically, the better the enjoyment in that pursuit. Increase the range of skill in computer and player, making stat boosts really mean something and hard to earn. Make boosts to stats more expensive, if you want to add money to the game its throwing down on equipment and even tournament entry fees could be interesting. Using money and energy strategically to position your self for the best opportunity to win tournaments. Another major gameplay one we think is time constraints around hitting the ball, try to limiting the time allowed to aim the ball, the more it feels like we have a small moment to attack the ball the more exciting it is. We try to hit the ball back as fast as we can even though we dont have to. Secondly, if you miss the ball, NO RETRY! You dont get retry in real life, just as you dont get retry in retro bowl to throw. We dont think you want to change coach every few games, you should have same coach for each season, and training should incorporate them, they should have more impact on your progression or lack therof as a player, pay for a bad coach and training does less for you, pay for a good coach and does more etc. Coaching could help conditioning as well, so good coaches allow energy depletion to be reduced during tournaments. That is all for now, thank you for this game, it can be an all timer.
If you cant win any tournaments or have enough energy to play anything here are some tips 1. If you are low on energy you hit weaker and you run slower 2. You dont have to play every single tournament, but you SHOULD win all of the tournaments you do play 3. If you hit the ball in the left or right part, it will go to the opposite direction 4. If you play for a little while, you get to serve, volley and lots of other stuff *5. GO TO SKILLS, CLICK THE BUTTON THAT SAYS TRAIN, AND REEEAAD **6. Go-through-the-tutorial.
AFTER RECENT UPDATE Love the updates in the new version, we played it a few days to test it out and it has been great so far. We can finally buy drinks with in-game money! Other things we complained about below were also addressed, like follower increases after successful interviews. The game is less buggy and some of the exploits seem to have been patched. We can assure you there is no better casual tennis game in the app store than this. BEFORE UPDATE This is the first tennis mobile game ive played and its been a blast. Ive played the game every day since we downloaded it. The energy system was tedious at first, but we eventually figured out you have to use your rest days often at the start. However we really dislike the energy only being offered for real money, we feel like its a way to trick new players into spending money they dont even need to spend Plus the in-game money is worthless once you finish all lifestyle tiers. The best F2P equipments are worth between 200-280 so youll never have trouble affording them late in your career. The followers concept is bizarre as well. The interview game is nice but you dont really get much followers from it, even after winning the 1000 and grand slams. However if you get a dilemma including followers and pick them, your followers increase by what seems like 25% (not fully sure of the math) There are some bugs that need to be patched as well, a couple Ive come across: we keep getting news about being a shut-in and having a poor lifestyle even though we maxed out our lifestyle Level 9 trainer did not give us our reward for winning 4 grand slams in a season and making more than $2k in a season, even though the conditions seemed to be met on the screen overall we enjoy the game and think it has great potential, but it seems like the devs just want to make a quick buck off it.
As of today this game has 3 stars. We have enjoyed every second of playing this game and never really had problems with calls or energy. We think people just dont give the game enough time to level up their skills and are mad they cant win every game when they clearly arent at that level yet. People also dont pay attention to relationships helping your simulated score.
This game is amazing, and it has just the right amount of challenge, strategy and fun. The pressure thing is very annoying but it serves its purpose; making the illostrious tournaments harder to win. One thing we want added is a way to see records or past martches or when we last played the person we are playing so your in-mind storylines are better. Ex: we know Ive played the guy named Wu at least 5 times in our first 2 seasons but we want to know who has whos number, you know, who can get it done against the other guy. Other than that, amazing game.
We think this game is pretty fun but holy does it get our blood boiling when we cant control how the score ends up. Getting one play then jumping forward to when Im down from 15-0 to 40-15 is annoying. We also hate that the ball will be next to our character and he will NOT HIT IT (could be skill issue though) . Still a very fun game.
Only problem Ive got is that Ill be in the middle of a match, and the CPU referee will randomly call out out when the ball is literally within the boundaries of the court. Its getting annoying, but nothing too big a deal.
In year 7 and when we click to go play on the Home Screen it freezes and we are unable to continue to play. Last time this happened at year 4. Great game but not worth it to start over again.
Enjoyed this game very much. Still playing our first career Im at the point where Ive maxed out our player as much as we can and the games are easy now. Even putting it on hard mode doesnt really make it challenging. But the initial grind when youre first starting out is worth playing. We guess the older our player gets (right now Im 31 years old) the game may get back to being challenging but so far Im still having our way with opponents. Also we like how throughout the years opponents get better themselves while others fall off for whatever reason. Makes it realistic.
This is good but we need retro basketball now.
We really enjoy this game. Once you get the mechanics down its easy to play but still challenging enough to keep you on your toes. Our major problem is that we have lost two career saver to the game just freezing. We tap the save file and nothing. This has happened twice with maxed out characters. Please look into this issue.
Fix your game its impossible to win also when u have to pay for it and youre always 2 missed shots away from match point.
Love the game and the gameplay. The matches are fun once you get the hang of it and upgrade the right skills. Literally our only issue with the gameplay is the energy. Im a level 40 and idk when it happens but the NRG drink prices go up by so much. Why does it cost 500 coins to get 25% of our energy back. And when we do watch ads for free energy we spin the wheel and most the time we only win 25 coins which isnt even half of what we need to get the lowest amount of energy. If your energy recharged after a certain amount of time or the nrg drink prices went down this game would be impeccable.
We liked the game at first but the mechanics were hard to get used to as a diehard retro bowl player and there where confusing things like a lot of the different ways to get stuff in the game was gamboling and was hard to get used to unlike in retro bowl where there are options to choose for your players. We did however like that they had more personal life stuff into the game play but it also felt more like just promotions.
Please change the 40-40 to make it allow us to play that point, its so frusting as to skip that part in which you could have totally won the match, with it skipping its so annoying because we know we would win, horrible idea to make it skip the most important point please change.
We dont like how you have to waste energy on Family and Friends which Energy is already so limited. Theres no point and is the only thing wrong in this game.
We love the general mechanics of the game, but we dont like how the aiming phase doesnt give us a projected landing area. We cant easily tell how hard we need to hit the ball to, say, get it right over the net or just on the line in the back. It should be easier for us to make that shots we want than it is. Im used to the more forgiving NSS where short and longer shots can both result in success. The game doesnt feel always in our control, especially with a slow character missing the returns we eagerly want them to. Makes it feel more rigged than challenging like in Soccer.
Even when our player is fully upgraded, they put us in a game 1 set down 5-3, with match point. We hit the ball, the opponent hits an insane return and wins the game. Great potential, but please fix this.
Ive played tons of rounds, and we did a tournament where in the final, even though we had good gear, almost max happiness and we put EVERY point we had into speed in order to keep up, we STILL could not get anything past the AI player. He was able to run back and forth and never missed a shot the whole entire set, across the entire court no matter how steep the angle of the shot was, and even though we had invested every point into speed and spent REAL money to get more energy just to make sure and max out our energy meter before the final, we STILL lost because the AI served, we hit it back at a hard to catch angle and the AI moved insanely fast and caught it, and launched it across the court with a hit way steep, almost completely sideways, and our player just literally couldnt move to the ball, and that was it. All that waste in what could have been a fun experience, ruined because the game says. This whole entire match system needs a rework if its possible to lose just because the computer says we lose now, no matter how well we did. We spent REAL money to have the game go, youre losing this match and you cant do anything because you have no actual control.
Not a bad game, but the overall gameplay loop gets tiring even after the first 10 rounds – we understand that it's hard to code impactful points with the tennis point system but after a few rounds it just always feels like a slog. You also have to manually win every game/set point which is fair but you don't manually defend them which does not feel good. Why is it that when we lose an AD or 40-30 we just automatically lose the game or even the set? The energy system is fine but there should probably be a heavier penalty for low energy or something since you can still win every single game at 1% energy if you're good enough/lucky. It also just doesn't make sense for happiness to be the main factor for simulated game performance – why not your skill level compared to opponent or even energy level? It just feels like you're trying to make use of the relationship mechanic from NSS or something but it has no place in this tennis system and feels pretty contrived. Also maybe an energy gauge for the opponent too since it's crazy to have novak get our perfectly spun serve 50 miles to the side then still make it back to the baseline in a 3rd set 6-6 tiebreak.
But energy runs out too fast and energy drinks are too expensive.
We love playing this game, and we love playing Retro Bowl, The energy system makes them not even comparable. Cant even play the game because you guys went with a super money grab system. Right now we are in the grand slam week and we cant even play it we have to rest because we dont have energy. Uninstalling.
We like New Star Games. Retro bowl is our favorite, but retro goal is fun too. Tennis is just too much going on. Its not simple like the others Would love to see retro hoops.. Lol or some sort of basketball. Just please keep it simple.
We love retro slam tennis like all of the games by new star, ive been playing for a while however ive encountered a glitch. When we open the game and try to get back into our main player the game crashes and im forced to quit out, this has happened every time ive tried to play for the past 3 months and id love to get back into the game.
It says we need to be 16 or older or have a parents or guardian but when we press continue nothing happens so why, how can we play game.
The shotmaking abilities of opposing players is out of control even when youre at max level. Fun concept and we really wanted to like it but super-frustrating.
User feedback from Apple App Store
App Details
- Version: 1.0.55
- Size: 41.34 MB
- iOS: 12.0 or later
- Languages: EN
- Content Advisory: Infrequent/Mild Simulated Gambling
- Developer: [New Star Games]()
Last updated: 4th August 2025 | Genre: Sports, Roleplaying | Developer: New Star Games