TL:DR first: Love Wrestling? Love to sit on your couch and just have some laid back fun punching people in creative ways, alone or with friends? Then this is absolutely worth a buy. Try getting it at a reduced price, and you'll be very happy with what you get. (I got it at the 50% sale). Is it a great game? I don't know. It sure is FUN though. Because everything bad about it is optional. LONGER REVIEW: From the perspective of someone who played ALL the wrestling games up until and including PS3, and then hasn't played one since then: Most reviews really weren't helpful to me, because all of them seem to be written from the perspective of people that played all the WWE 2kXX games. I have no previous experience with them. So I find some things to be way better than often described, and some, well, just plain weird. GAME MODES: I don't get what that "MyFaction" stuff is. How it works, why it is fun, or why people play it. I tried "trying it", but I was just weirded out in many ways. Seems like a completely unnecessary cash grab inside a game. Like a game inside a game, to get the player to spend money in a gatcha-card-collector fashion. It's just weird IMO. And luckily completely optional. I looked at it once, and then never again, and I am missing 0 fun or good content because of it. Then there's the "normal matches", where you can play a wide variety of rulesets and scenarios with all your favourite wrestlers, and your own creations from the INSANELY vast character creator that gives you a TON of freedom to customize - maybe even a little TOO much, because I got completely lost in it. This is the mode where you just have some fun once in a while, or while having some friends over, drinking a beer and cooperatively folding people on the screen. There is also a "MyRise" mode, which is basically career mode with a story. It's fun, it's EXACTLY what I expected from a WWE Storymode in a WWE game, with all the cool action, the spectacle, the corny dialogues and themes, the intrigue, the goofy humor at times, and just a good show, with all the necessary gameplay elements. Such as upgrading your wrestler by doing Live Matches on the side, as a kind of "optional quest to improve your skills". This keeps the dopamine coming. Number goes up, Number good. It has replayability, because it has branching storylines. Do not expect a super deep novel-esque story though, this is wrestling. It's a corny story, full of pathos, loyalty, betrayal, abductions, thiefery, sorcery. What did you expect. I'm having a blast playing this mode. Pure and utter nostalgia after so many years of abscence. GAMEPLAY: As for the gameplay - damn did they manage to make the movesets accessible. It is an art in an of itself to map a controler input layout for so, so many different skills, and context based actions. And this, I'd say, is where the game shines. The controls are a 9/10. Maybe even a 10/10. I have NO idea how a wrestling game could be controlled BETTER. No complaints. I am just happy with it. And I write that as a handicapped person, who often finds, well, handicaps with normal controller inputs. Not this time. I heard that previous versions of this game had no intergender wrestling and no blood? Since my last wrestling game was on the PS3, and was basically "uncensored" in every way, I am happy that now that I decided to play WWE games again... I basically come back to what I know, and not a reduced experience as it seemingly was in the meantime. Kudos! What I do not like is the main menu - many options are rather hidden, or needlessly layered, or locked behind certain contexts. For example, there is no "Options" or "Graphic settings". There is a "Extras" button, that THEN leads to Graphic Settings etc. Who does that? That is just weird. Or how the game modes are displayed in the main menu. If you aren't already used to the WWE games, none of it seems intuitive. Like, how shall I know that "MyRise" is Storymode? How shall I know, that I can only import previously created custom characters to the MyRise mode if I have at least one savegame of MyRise already, so that I can SEE the list with the import button? (which is completely missing if you never played myrise before, despite the tutorial telling you that you SHOULD import at least 2 characters.) This has been rather infuriating in the first few hours of trying to play this game - because until I was actually able to play the story... oh boy did that cost time due to certain issues, and mistakes I made, not knowing the games quirks, or how character creation works. If you wanna play the story, do yourself a favor: Start the story, create two completely random characters IN the story, then go back to main menu. Then to "Superstar", which is the character creator (did I mention that the menu descriptions suck? Oh. Yeah I did.), and create your actual characters there. You need a male AND a female for storymode. Save em, go back to storymode, now you should see a list if saves - and on that list, on the lower end of your screen there's the hint how to import your characters. Why do it this way? Because - second issue aside from menus - The game occasionally crashes. It does not happen often. It is not a big problem. Usually. Never has crashed during a match, which is the most important part. It DOES crash more often during character creation though, and THAT is infuriating. There is a "quicksave" option in the character creator, which you should use very, very frequently during character creation, or you'll lose A LOT of time, because the editor is so immensely detailed. Which is cool. But also, well, doesn't allow for a quick start. Especially since you need 2 characters, not only 1. So, this game sucks at menu-UI design. But it is brilliant and extremely fun in actual gameplay. Luckily you'll only need to figure the menus out once. So it is a very temporary problem. I have NOT tried the online content yet. That island mode just looked giga cringe in many ways. I'll keep playing myself, and with some bros, having a good time. Character creator - 9/10 (would be a 10/10 if the menu layout was better and if it was crash-free) Menus 4/10 Ingame UI 8/10 Graphics 9/10 Sound 8/10 Controls 10/10 Fun 10/10 Solo-Content: 9/10 Coop Content: 9/10 Nostalgia: 10/10. Timetravel to better days, when you and the boys just sat in front of a playstation 2 and didn't have a care in the world. Online: Who knows. Solid 8/10 wrestling game. (Would be a 9/10, if it wasn't so eager in trying to get you to spend more money for completely unnecessary stuff. That luckily can be ignored because wll, it's unnecessary.)
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