Modes included are Training, Arcade (a series of single matches until you rule!), Exhibition (single game), Summer Heat US Tour (take on a whole season of play on courts across the US) and the Mini Party Games. The 3 mini games need to be unlocked, the first being Nerd Smash, a Whack-A-Mole style game where you have to hit the ball over the net and take out all manner of weird objects to score points. The other 2 are Ice Court and Beach Bowls but we'll leave it for you to discover what they're all about. There's also the Beach House where from a weird floaty 1st-person perspective you can move around inside your beach home viewing and interacting with unlocked items such as trophies, music videos, music tracks from the game and game trailers.

Speaking of unlocking stuff, you'll be doing so much of it (as you will watching fairly quick load screens!) that you'll be wondering how long it can actually keep on going with apparently over 200 goodies to reveal. Don't get too excited though as the vast majority of it is stuff like new sunglasses, swimsuits and shorts for your playable characters. The handful of really worthwhile unlockables includes the extra characters, the minigames, music vids of your fave pop stars who donated tracks to the game, all the playable music tracks and a bunch of Acclaim game trailers. Now we like Kylie but of the only 5 available music videos there are 2 almost identical versions of Love At First Sight (the original and the US edit) which seems like a waste of disc space to us when maybe a Hawaiin Shirt Day video from Freshmaka could have been included if available instead. A bonus if you're a Kylie nut we suppose and it's not that painful to sit through both we can assure you...

The multiplayer game is one that's guaranteed to provide some great times with your mates as it's where each of you can test your skills and where teamplay is all important. Here you have the option of 2-player with one on each side using AI teammates or co-op with you and a mate vs 2 AI players. For the ultimate multiplayer volleyball game though grab a multitap and 3 buddies for some of the most intense teamwork battles you can have!

Graphically Summer Heat is quite nice with a fairly high poly count and good, smooth character animations. A lot of effort's obviously been put into making characters look and move as realistically as possible and attention to detail here is excellent. On the other hand it could also be argued that they're a little generic and have a bit of a plastic look about them especially on the character selection screen. They do move fairly well about the court though and the little touches like dusting themselves off, adjusting bikini tops and performing high-fives after scoring a point adds nicely to the overall effect. Deformable sand looks good and reacts quite nicely too as your characters move around and dive for those wide balls.

The stages where each of the courts are located on the other hand seem to have suffered as a consequence of focusing on playable character creation and animation. While most contain plenty of objects, people and little animations of their own here and there, the detail quality could best be described as basic compared to that seen in the other previously-mentioned titles. We even felt that some of them seemed embarrasingly simplistic by today's standards. Lighting and shadows are thankfully well done except for the odd time where a character shadow seems to look rather blocky considering the smooth-looking character casting it.

Soundwise it's plus and minus time again. The biggest plus is the Dolby Pro Logic II presentation that allows you to enjoy all the audio content to the fullest. However you might not actually enjoy "all" of it. While character voices are ok and get the job done the limited range of comments, grunts and groans means there's quite a lot of repetition with some of the screechier outbursts bound to get on your nerves after a while. Game commentary from the annoyingly robotic announcer falls into the same category.

Music is a mixed bag. Sound reproduction is great and at first the teeny pop style fits the nature of the game well. With only 11 tracks though containing a mixture of Top 40 Chart pop/punk and some in-house dancey Euro-pop tunes repetition is an absolute killer. To be honest it drove us nuts especially when the game seems to favour a few of the tracks more than others and you end up hearing the same song several times during each stage.

Overall Summer Heat Beach Volleyball appears to us to do virtual beach volleyball better than the competition. Gameplay is pretty solid, well put together, realistic and accessible with a degree of challenge on the harder difficulty settings. Multiplayer is especially entertaining with 1 or 3 friends and recommended for your next get together (this will be coming out at the next GP staff party!). Although the game probably has limited appeal and not a huge deal of longevity in single-player once you've collected the unlockables, at it's reduced price it's good value for money. Especially considering it's the only volleyball game available for your Playstation 2.