Pile-driver or sleeper hold?
The actual game engine for the wrestling leaves a hell of a lot to be desired with control that at times is dodgy and at others actually seems to work against you. After a few hours of play you will, like me, start to believe that actually wrestling in real life might well be a lot easier than portrayed here. You have a general purpose attack button for strikes which, depending on the context, might slap, punch or kick your opponent in a variety of ways. You also have two grappling buttons, each doing a different type of grapple whether they’re tapped or held. In addition to this you can counter attacks or grapples using the triggers and it’s with these controls that problems raise their heads and start throwing bottles into the ring.
Because the buttons perform different moves depending on where you are in relation to your opponent, you can very easily find yourself doing something that you just didn’t want to do. This is especially so when you want to get in and grapple, as for some moves you need to either tap or hold a button at the same time as moving the d-pad in a certain direction. Get the timing wrong and you can easily find yourself backing off from a stricken opponent instead of moving in for the kill. Worse, if you want to body slam a fallen wrestler, you might miss totally, leaving you rolling around on the floor while your opponent gets up and then clobbers you.
Another problem is the whole ‘counter’ move system, which in anything other than easy mode is next to useless. The idea here is that you can block or counter most moves giving you the upper hand in a match. Say you’re stuck in an arm lock from behind, hit the counter move trigger and you might throw your attacker over your shoulder before giving them a good kicking whilst they writhe in agony on the canvas. In easy mode you get a little icon by your health bar to tell you when to attempt a counter. In any other mode, including multiplayer, that icon isn’t there, making countering very hard indeed and a completely hit or miss affair as other than the icon there are no visual cues as to when you should attempt a counter.
This becomes especially frustrating if you end up on the canvas. Few match modes end any other way than getting your opponent in a submission, all the health bar does is determine how many hits you can take until you drop and how long your wrestler take to recover from being stunned. Once you’re down on the canvas your opponent can rain successive blows down on you with impunity as there’s no way to know when to counter any attack. Multiplayer matches soon become tedious as one of you rolls around on the canvas struggling to get up while the other struggles with the controls trying to get you in a submission lock. If you do end up in a lock, it can be damn near impossible to break out as you’ve no idea when to counter and the match soon degenerates into a button bashing frenzy until one of you becomes too bored or too tired to bother anymore… hardly the excitement of the real thing.
Matches against the AI fare little better but I’m glad to say that the game mechanics work against computer controlled opponents just as much as they do against you. The pixel perfect positioning needed for some moves proves to be just as tricky for the AI as it does for you, but sadly this means the AI will keep on trying a move until it gets it whereas you might give up and go try something else. Each wrestler’s AI is programmed with a leaning towards that wrestler’s style, so if you’re fighting someone who likes climbing the ropes and flinging themselves onto you, the AI will try and do just that.
This can lead to some amusing moments but for completely the wrong reasons. You lay on the canvas, writhing in agony and the AI heads off to the ropes. Now if you roll out of the way, the AI will head back towards you, so roll back and the AI turns around to go climb the ropes… you roll away again, the AI comes back and so on and so on. Other times, the AI will repeat a move so often you think it’s stuck in a loop. With the grappling being such a hit and miss affair, it’s not uncommon to see wrestlers grabbing for each other even though they’re a couple of feet apart. Cue the tactic of just walking in a circle and watching the AI grab and grab and grab until you eventually stray too close and teleport the last foot or so to go into the grappling mode.
Much has been made of the use of motion capture to animate the players, but there are obvious gaps here. All the stuff you’d expect is there such as walking, punching, kicking and all the holds etc, but the problem with motion capture in a game like this is that there’s a massive number of ways players can attack each other. It seems that Studio Gigante have missed a few bits out as you grab someone from behind to then suddenly find yourself in the same old face to face grapple. Criticisms of the AI are alleviated a little at harder difficulty settings, but the flawed game mechanics mean that attacking a stunned player will snap them out of it unless you floor them, so you spend time waiting to be hit as you recover faster. This might have been to make the game more playable, but having a better defence system would have done that just as well, if not better.
