A crushing disappointment. It looks like the whole thing was just a $60 (or $80 for Elite) backdoor for a battle royale game with a battleA crushing disappointment. It looks like the whole thing was just a $60 (or $80 for Elite) backdoor for a battle royale game with a battle pass.
The CAW is worse than games made 20+ years ago; WWF War Zone has more options and items. No sliders, no logos, no text. Baffling decisions, like LOD shoulder pads but no face paint. Great Muta headgear, but no pants. Call names for hundreds of people and you have no way of creating them. Eight faces for males. The moveset editor is great, although scrolling through and finding certain moves will eat up your time. That's the only good thing about this CAW mode. If you waste your time making someone, either make your own OC or try one of the most basic-looking wrestlers ever, such as Steve Austin.
Season mode is akin to the one from Smackdown 2, in that most of it is loading screens and prompts for meaningless choices, such as whether you want to join Death Triangle. You'll spend more time in menus managing repetitive choices with repetitive cut scenes than you will wrestling. Multi-man matches boil down to move > pin > break up pin, over and over. Once your health is depleted, the AI attempts to pin off everything, and they will succeed. The AI always changes focus to you when you get near them, regardless of what they are doing or who is attacking them. Handicap matches result in one or two characters stomping you repeatedly while the other tries grappling or pinning you. In a tag match, knocking the illegal man off the apron before attempting a pin isn't suggested, it's required. Submissions are a guaranteed cheap win. Three DDTs and a chinlock will end the match. The fact that the ring explodes after two minutes tells you everything you need to know about match length. Also, you can win before it explodes. There is no referee in this match type, so pinfalls are automatic and quick.
Online play is exactly what you would expect. 49% cheaters, 50% of people acting like their life depends on a victory, and 1% of others. There were dozens of ways to cheap your way to a win learned on the first day, including selecting a custom arena so the game would BSoD on your opponent and you could pin them instantly. Granted, that (one particular thing out of many) was later patched.
You punch your opponent and it doesn't connect because they are grappling you. You grapple an opponent and it doesn't connect because they are striking you. It's maddening. You sell for entirely too long. I was on the ground, selling a punch, for 40 seconds at the 2:00 mark in the match. You have no indication that you're progressing to a standing state, where you are at in the submission process or anything else of that nature. You target and grapple someone who is groggy with no defensive stance, and you're warped to someone you aren't targetting who is in a defensive stance.
Once you reach signature status, you keep it until you're hit. My current record for spamming signature moves, which are just as strong as finishers, is 23. There is a criminal amount of recycled animations from the later SvR games, like SvR10. Most diving moves are leftover animations from SvR's create-a-finisher mode. In fact, the season mode of that game is basically the same as this... it will quickly devolve into "earn CAW stats mode," if you even want to make CAWs in the first place.
Entrances may as well not even exist. You get timed pyro and gimmicks like streamers or lazers, but you can't select a camera angle that allows you to see them. You can't edit the text on wrestlers' chyrons, either, which seemed like an obvious inclusion.
The actual gameplay isn't like No Mercy, but rather Day of Reckoning. That isn't a bad thing, but DoR was already a watered-down knock-off of No Mercy when it came out. In 2004. You can have a great back-and-forth match if you're good at the game and have an equal, or better, opponent. As a bland, lifeless pick-up-and-play wrestling game, you can surely do worse. You won't find it with the AI or your random online opponent, though.
They can save it by retooling the CAW, inserting a GM/franchise mode, balancing gameplay, punishing online quitters/disconnectors, and releasing plentiful updates that give players new moves and matches for free. Instead, we're getting AEW: Fortnite.
I have supported this game since 2020, and prayed it would be the savior from 2K's gameplay, which is painfully repetitive, slow, and plays like it is held together with duct tape. It isn't. 2K23 is infinitely better in every possible way. That is soul-crushing for me to admit. This game is meat with no potatoes, no dressing, no cornbread, no gravy, no water, no knife, no plate, no napkin. Nothing. With that said, the meat itself is bland, flavorless, and tough. It's really close to being rancid, in fact.
3/10. From planning leagues and e-feds, and rallying my friends to get hyped, to never wanting to talk about the game ever again.… Expand
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