Now before anyone says anything I actually requested to review this. To find out why go and read my review of last years WWE effort in which I scored it a 9 and even said it was more game for your money than KOTOR. Now a lot has happened since the 16th of November 2003 when I wrote that. I have gotten engaged, had long term sick leave and purchased a nice new TV. I’m not sure what, however, has happened over at YUKE’s. You see 2004’s PS2 WWE effort no longer gives me fond memories of my old school buddy (who 12 months on I have still not heard from) and Hulk Hogan, instead it makes me see just how juvenile and silly the whole wrestling thing is. I still stand by the score I gave last year’s game (maybe it was the medication) but to me it seems like there has been a big step backwards with this latest effort.
The game initially looks and plays the same, no obvious new graphics engine or anything is present. Once you get wrestling though, a few new things become evident. The first addition is the “clean” or “dirty” wrestling style. Each character in the game falls into one of these two categories and has a meter which fills up as they perform to that style (to encourage playing in character) the dirty meter is increased by using low blows, cheating and be a general bad guy, whilst the clean meter fills up when you behave like a good guy. But this is the BIG problem - it’s much easier to be bad. The game even has a list of moves which fall into the dirty category and I found you could fill the dirty meter up 4 or 5 times quicker than you could the clean one. Once the meter is full it allows you become invulnerable for a short period of time and to pull off more powerful moves. Suffice to say the game is much, much easier when playing as a bad character.
This then brings me on to the difficulty of the game. Last year’s effort was hard, but challengingly so. This years seems to be either too hard (on normal level) or too easy (on 'easy'), this takes away most of the fun that there was last year and makes many of the fights very, very easy. Even a newly created bog-standard character can easily overcome many of the well known faces straight from the start. The only losses tend to be more down to the controls than the AI fighters. Take the ladder match as an example, where your character seems to prefer to jump 20 feet to the outside of the ring rather than 2 feet to the suspended belt. Another criticism here is the amount of time it takes your wrestler to get up after being knocked to the mat. No amount of button tapping or stick moving seems to make him (or her) react and you can find that you are powerless to do anything but get a beating (or watch as your opponent climbs the ladder to win). This would not be so bad if it was after a very long match and you had been beaten senseless, but even on the lowest difficulty level it pretty much always seems to be the case.
The game still has a very, very powerful create a wrestler mode, in which it’s possible (usually with the help of a guide off the net) to create anyone you could possibly wish for, be it a wrestler from the past, Spiderman or even (and you would have to be very sad and have shed loads of time) yourself. You can then give the wrestler which moves you want and go through the game’s career mode with your newcomer. The career mode is again another example of where the game seems to have taken a step back from last year. It feels much more guided and seems to have many, many less variable stories. It appears that Yuke’s have decided to go even more for the 16 year olds by basing the game around the ex-porn stars that are the WWE Divas. Almost every storyline is based around which one of these plastic bints are going to manage you. It’s Melrose Place-bad in its stories, the very first one sees you getting to shower with some girl you have just met. The Divas even do “enhanced” bra and panties matches… Oh dear…
Whilst the graphics engine does not appear to have changed, the audio side of things has – but it’s yet another case of last year being superior. I can forgive the music as (whilst not my style of music) some tunes are rather catchy and they do appear to be taken from the wrestlers’ own themes, and therefore fit in with the WWE World, but it’s the commentary and wrestlers’ voices that really annoy. Anyone who has seen Suburban Commando or Mr Nanny will know that wrestlers can NOT act (although they never stop trying on the WWE shows) and the voiceovers (provided by the “stars”) just make you want to cringe. You then have the commentary, which from looking at the game box and the publicity would seem to be one of the “selling points” – now I have no idea whose idea that was but it was a bad one. It’s worse than the commentary you used to get on early FIFA titles (back on the PlayStation) all the speeches are disjointed, phrases (which are hardly ever applicable) are used over and over again and they try to make out that the fight between the two unknowns is the biggest fight since Ali Vs. Foreman. It soon got turned off.
As you can probably tell, I was most disappointed by this year’s effort, and anyone considering a wrestling game (maybe for that nice slim PSTwo) would be much better off picking up the year-old Here Comes the Pain for less than half the price. It still is a much better game - trust me, I loaded it up to make sure it wasn’t just the tablets…
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