Personally WWE isn’t for me. I’m a UFC man really. But the elaborate moves and huge variety in match rules do fit incredibly well into a video game. I’ve often found a surprising amount of fun to be had with WWE games and so I was actually quite excited to get on WWE 2K14.
From the main menu there are only a few options available to you. You can play single matches under pretty much any rules you want from WWE. Or you can dive into “30 Years of Wrestlemania” mode which is WWE’s replacement for a career mode. As the name suggests, you will travel through time and play, what I assume are, the greatest moments in Wrestlemania.
You will be given objectives that coincide with whatever happen during that iconic moment. Which is all well and good but can also be very irritating. In the second match you will need to get your opponent to critical health, body slam them and then escape a cage. What’s irritating is when you’ve performed the body slam and you get floored and your opponent escapes. Fail. Restart.
I admit I’m not very good at WWE but the amount of times I had to sit and watch while I failed is just ridiculous. Loss of control is probably the single most frustrating thing that can happen in any video game. Especially when you can see your objective slowly, sarcastically get away. And it’s a theme that is carried through the entire game. A good 80% of the time there is absolutely no input required what so ever.
That being said the control system is numbingly basic. The only feature I liked was the ability to quickly bring up an onscreen prompt to decide which part of your opponent to damage during a grab. Basic attack is on ‘square’ and grabs are entirely performed with ‘X’. That’s about it. But it really doesn’t matter because if you can’t master reversals you’re not going to win. At all. At the appropriate time pressing ‘R2’ will reverse your opponents move and put you back on top. A tutorial of some sort would have helped when learning the ropes but unfortunately there isn’t one at all.
Personally I found the timing of the counters to be far too specific. A prompt will come up on your wrestler’s head indicating when you need to press the button. But it doesn’t matter because by the time you see it it’s too late. You really need to learn the timing of the moves and perfect the art. If you can the game will be fantastically easy. In fact you’ll almost never take any damage. If you can’t it will be annoying and difficult. And this is the single challenge in WWE. There’s nothing more complicated or deep it’s just learning when to press a single button at the right time. When it goes well it’s not satisfying and when it goes badly it’s irritating.
So I very quickly got bored of WWE. The combat is just the same thing over and over and over and draping some unimaginative objectives around a few matches is no replacement for a career mode. The combat just isn’t entertaining enough to carry the game. The two wrestlers will stand there rigidly smashing the air that sometimes happens to have another wrestler in it. Grabbing is unbearably stunted. Moves seem to go on and on while you sit there watching with no input whatsoever. Even QTE’s would be better. At least I’m doing something.
The effects are mediocre at best. There’s nothing at all to get excited about. Character models are enough to look roughly like their real world counterparts but the detail stops there. Some of the lighting effects are decent but the majority of the textures are so poor its difficult to notice them. Worst of all I was disappointed with the character animations. For a game that clearly relies so strongly on character movement and interaction it’s strange that the fighting looks so robotic. If that one thing had been right a lot of the other visuals wouldn’t matter.
With poor overall presentation and a lack of interesting game modes WWE is very disappointing. Unless you’re content playing endless single matches there really isn’t much on offer. “30 Years Of Wrestlemania” is a nice idea but it’s not really an adequate replacement for a career mode. A lack of tutorial really doesn’t help and you will spend half of the game not even knowing how to do the things you want to do and the other half pressing ‘R2’. If you can master the reversal timings you will be unstoppable, if you can’t you will probably find WWE quite frustrating most of the time. There really just isn’t that much fun to be had with WWE 2K14.
Reviewed on PS3.
