I’ll be honest, I don’t watch much WWE wrestling nowadays, with more creative and exciting wrestling going on in other promotions drawing the bulk of my attention. When it comes to video games though, “there can only be one” and that means that once again it’s down to the WWE 2K series to quench my grappling needs… but is it up to the task bestowed upon it?
In a way, yes. As a pure simulation of wrestling, the gameplay is as good as it’s ever been. Sure there are certain issues with collision detection between different height wrestlers and when there are multiple objects littered around, but if you’re like me and the first thing you want to do is pit Shinsuke Nakamura against Akira Tozawa and finally get a chance to strike with a blistering Bomaye, then it will deliver. The same can be said for many of the match ups you may have conceived in your mind, as this game boosts a massive roster, and while there may be some DLC related omissions (I’m looking at you Hardy Boyz!) there’s a lot of fun to be had creating dream match ups and fighting in two-player mode with someone else sitting beside you.
Unfortunately, that magic that gets you smiling ear to ear soon starts to fade away as you progress more and more into the underbelly of the game. Like I said, it’s a solid wrestling game when played with someone else and there’s a lot of fun to be had but as soon as you start playing against the computer, something feels off. The way the computer controlled characters act just isn’t fitting with the actual wrestler’s style. This is fine when you’re playing someone else and they do things a certain wrestler wouldn’t, but when you find yourself losing a half hour 5 star classic match against the Undertaker because he decided to keep throwing you outside of the ring and then win via count out… well that’s just ridiculous.
Now that whole paragraph may sound like I’m being salty about being beaten in a game – and it is – but for a franchise centred around characters and a marketing campaign based around individuality, I can’t help but feel that there’s nothing separating how any of the wrestlers you take on react and wrestle, and from my experience so far they don’t. In every match I’ve had so far it has been up to me to create moments, been up to me to set the pace and aggression of a match and up to me to instigate pretty much everything that happens. Every time you wrestle, you are coming up a reactive opponent instead of a proactive one and it just doesn’t feel fun.
Another thing that adds to the feeling of anti-perfection is the emphasis on reversals and just how important they are to literally every match. The concept used to make sense when you had unlimited reversals so you knew that no matter what, you could always get out of a savage beat down and start a stellar comeback. But now with your reversals limited to 3/5 at one time, it tends to play out in a much more tedious way. That way being: you gaining momentum to take control of the match whilst using your reversals to keep yourself going, you running out of reversals, the other wrestler reversing one of your moves, then you just being kind of stuck in limbo, unable to do anything whilst you wait for a reversal block to build back up so you can do something. There is honestly nothing more frustrating than being able to do nothing, and all it would take to rectify this is the implementation of a simple block button similar to what the older WWE games used to have!
That’s the main problem with WWE 2K18 and has been the problem with pretty much every WWE2K game since THQ’s departure in 2012 with WWE13. Now, I’m not blaming it on Take Two and their 2K sports division but I can’t help but think that there’s a lot more “simulation” and a lot less “fun” in 2K’s ever expanding series of wresting games, and when you’re trying to simulate something as over the top as wrestling, it needs to at least be fun. With all this negativity on the wrestling side of the game we haven’t even touched on the other aspects of the game, and I’ll be honest I don’t really want to…. but let’s get to it I guess.
Creativity-wise there’s actually a lot on offer, with a pretty in depth character/arena/highlight/video/match/move creation tools, allowing you to bend the wrestling universe to whatever you see fit. Unfortunately though, if you’re the type of person who enjoys creating a character and taking them through the always weak story mode, then get ready for possibly one of the worst so far with this year’s ‘MyCareer’ mode.
MyCareer isn’t just bad: it’s an absolute embarrassment, showcasing a company’s greed to join in with the popularity of Loot Boxes in games, then getting cold feet, but still keeping the loot boxes in the game. Only now they’re earned by virtual currency you earn in the game, at an alarmingly slow rate. When you first start on your quest to be the best in a vest, you are given such a meagre selection of
aesthetic choices that it feels like they forgot to put them in. Every character you create will look bland and boring, and if you actually manage to get the MyCareer online mode “Road to Glory” to work, you’ll find that everyone else looks just as bland and boring as well. Not only that but the story is absolute trash and you have to walk about in between matches, talking to wrestlers about how much they love pizza?!
Don’t worry though because Universe mode is also boring and this year they’ve decided to remove the Showcase mode where you take on the mantle of wrestlers in classic matchups and replace it with… absolutely nothing. Well at least there’s online…. no wait that doesn’t work either, with massive waiting times for matches and an amount of lag that so bad that executing any move means you have to work out how to reverse and attack at least two seconds before you want your wrestler to actually do anything. The in-game music is also the worst I’ve ever heard.
So in closing, don’t buy this game. Don’t even look at it. Just spend your money on a ticket to an actual wrestling show, because at least then you’ll get a couple of hours of enjoyment.
Author: Hal, Plymouth Store
