The modes on offer, however, are far less thrilling. You’ve got thirty wrestlers, past and present, to pick from, each ridiculous caricatures of the ridiculous caricatures they are in real life.
So, any match up is a fair match up, and no one wrestler is better than the other, so it is completely down to the ability of the player in control to best the A.I or human player they’re against.Īny fan of WWE is going to get a kick out of the roster on offer. These need to be timed to perfection, or done on a stunned opponent, as they leave you open to attack, and even the most glancing of blows will put a stop to them, and cost you the special move in the process.Īs mentioned in the preview, they’ve done away with character ratings, too. Special moves and the Finisher are activated by first of all beating up your opponent until you’ve ‘charged’ one/it, then holding down either both light or heavy attacks, causing your chosen wrestler to do an slow lunge to grab them. Unlike a lot of recent wrestling games, you have a health bar, and when you’ve got your rivals suitably low enough, a finishing manoeuvre will knock them out, giving you an automatic win. To win a match, as well as going for the three count pin, you can simply incapacitate the other wrestler. This isn’t explained particularly well within the game, and with a lack of tutorial, you’d have to do some external reading to find out that there is more difference to the characters than just the moves list.
#WWE ALL STARS 360 SERIES#
For example, any big-man cannot perform spectacular dives to the outside, whilst grapplers have the unique ability to chain together series of moves. The characters are split into four different classes, brawler, grappler, high flyer and ‘big-man’, each affecting the type of skills you have at your disposal. It is a lot easier to pick up, and with less emphasis on the accuracy of a wrestlers repertoire of moves and more on looking big, powerful and damaging, it is more of a pick-up-and-play approach that should appeal to any non-wrestling fan you’re trying to coax into having a match with you. Once you’ve grabbed an opponent, you can deliver a slam or suplex – provided they don’t hit the reversal button at the correct time and use your own momentum against you. You’ve got a heavy and light grab and a strike, block and reversal button. Raw games, and this isn’t a bad thing at all. The gameplay has been simplified considerably from the Smackdown vs. If you’ve no idea what I was just talking about, then chances are a lot of the appeal of WWE All Stars is going to be lost on you. Here, The Undertaker first of all leaps twenty foot into the air, before dumping the victim brain first onto the canvas. It’d be fatal, or at least cause serious spinal trauma, if it weren’t for the way he takes the impact on his knees, the other wrestler’s head tucked slightly out of harms way. He picks his opponents up, head pointing directly towards the ground and appears to drive them into the mat. Take The Undertaker’s Tombstone Piledriver, for instance. Signature moves are no longer the almost graceful, elaborate techniques performed by the wrestlers, instead they’ve been taken to their logical extreme. The accurate renditions of wrestlers have been replaced with ones that look a lot more like the then WWF action figures of the early nineties – only on steroids. They’ve instead gone completely in the other direction.
There’s no ‘realism’ here, if indeed realism is a word you can use to describe a fight sport that has more in common with ballet and figure skating than say, boxing or mixed martial arts. WWE All Stars feels like a sequel to that game. Raw release, it was a game where the emphasis was on capturing the essence of wrestling – the overblown presentation, larger than life characters and action-packed theatrics. Instead of focusing on simulation, like the annual Smackdown vs. Which reminds me, I need to book Monday off work…Ī few years ago, THQ put out Legends of Wrestlemania – a more fun, simpler take on the WWE license.
#WWE ALL STARS 360 TV#
It is also a time of year, where twenty seven year old men, who are all old enough to know better, gather round a large TV with beer and pizza, and sit up until 4am, regressing back to their fifteen year old selves as the night’s matches unfold.
#WWE ALL STARS 360 PRO#
It is a celebration of all things pro wrestling, accentuating the positives from its past, and ignoring the not insubstantial amount of negatives. The one weekend every year when, although exhausted by their gruelling schedule, the wrestlers appear to give a toss about what they are doing.