When I was a wee lad, I used to go over to my friend Dave’s house just to play wrestling games. Back then we would watch WWF RAW and then switch the channel to WCW Nitro (I think that’s what it was called) before switching on the N64 to try and mimic some of the matches we had just seen. When more than four of us were there is was a mad round robin game, where the losers were eliminated. It was simple, it was fun, and it’s still probably one of the fondest memories from my childhood. Now while I haven’t watched any wrestling myself in number of years, I find myself with a son who does just like I used to, and he wants to play wrestling games like I did as well – so how well did THQ do here? Did it fondly remind me of days gone by?
The short answer is “not really”.
I’m normally the guy who likes games with a few miss steps in them – like the runt of the liter when you’re picking out a puppy. I might not give those games the best scores, but I’ll let my readers know that I genuinely enjoyed playing them despite those flaws. In regards to the single player experience here, that’s sadly not going to be the case. For starters, the A.I. doesn’t actually do anything intelligent at all, but rather spams grapple the entire time you get close. It’s the equivalent of playing a Mortal Kombat or a Street Fighter game against someone that only knows where the high kick button is. It’s more than annoying, it’s downright boring.
Even worse, is when you go to try and do something with a partner, and they seem to want to make your help pointless. I was in a match of the Miz and John Cena vs Kane and the Undertaker, and when the ref was down and I ran in as Cena to do his finisher on Kane, the Miz just kept walking up to him punching – effectively ruining any two one one bonus. It’s simply mind blowing to me that things like this even happen in games today – especially in one like this with so much potential in the single player realm.
Modes like The Road to Wrestlemania could have been great, had they just worked on it a little more. Maybe get some of the actual WWE writers to come up with the story next year to start, because the story here is an extreme yawn fest, and more predictable than if they had just included the transcript in with the game. Not only that, but the action never feels fresh at all – like you’re doing the same thing over and over (and I don’t just mean wrestling). Even the backstage brawls lose their excitement as soon as you realize there is only one backstage area.
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