WWE All Stars review

It’s a guaranteed fact that while at school every bloke, or anyone with masculine acquaintances, will have liked or known someone who enjoyed wrestling at one point or another. I was someone who knew people that liked wrestling and, harsh truth time, I begrudged it, and not just because of the daily ‘choke slams’ and ‘DDTs’ (I still don’t know what that means). Read on for the full WWE All Stars review.

No my chagrin was piqued becauseWWE All Stars publisher THQ first launched the Smackdown series right when my friends were of the age to enjoy throwing one another to, and hugging each other on, the floor. This inevitably led to my friends getting over excited and inviting everyone to their houses for afternoons of shout-y homoerotic tension.

Here is where my main irritation with WWE games stems from: afternoons spent playing a lethargic, clumsy, grapple heavy excuse for a video game which was about as much fun as a metal yo-yo. I preached for hours about its shortcomings and tried to turn them to ‘proper’ fighting games, to the Street Fighters, to the Soul Blades, but they were content with the shallow combat and jerky animations that WWE All Star’s forebears suffered from.

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New Challenger

I’ve watched wrestling games from afar since those early days of fist-shaking and passive-aggressive dislike as they’ve slowly gotten more complicated in terms of underlying mechanics. However from where I stand behind my Ryu and Ragna shaped shields they have never fixed those core issues of being stodgy and rather unspectacular to anyone who can’t tell their Undertakers from their Rocks.

Enter WWE All-Stars, the first game from new boys THQ San Diego and a clear attempt to broaden the genre’s appeal to more than just its core audience. Taking cues from exaggerated ‘spectacle’ fighters such as Marvel vs Capcom this turn in the ring ignores realism for the purpose of raw entertainment, for those playing and anyone watching. The most obvious change for WWE All Stars is that the fighters are overblown caricatures, with varying degrees of success, but then there is the over the top approach to that ‘stodgy’ combat…

Even if you don’t ‘know’ wrestling you’ll whoop in WWE All Stars as a character is hit from one side of the ring to the other, bouncing back across into a spine crushing bear hug. You’ll cheer as a character back flips onto the corner post and performs an illuminated quadruple front flip before slamming down on his poor opponent knees first. You’ll wince as a poor victim is held face first in a sweaty man’s privates, taken abnormally high into the air, and slammed down with the force of 20 elephants, in slow motion, sending shockwaves rippling from the impact.

What’s more, WWE All Star’s fights are slick. Gone is the laborious trudging pace of previous wrestling games and in their place is an oiled, kinetic experience that has grapplers acting and reacting to a bevy of situations, all fuelled by one key idea that channels All Stars nippy approach to the sport: Make things simpler in the name of improved playability.

Reversal of Fortune

Gone are stamina bars, gone are complicated pin breaks, and gone are most of the rules. What’s more the core combat has been focused on three main ideas, punches, grapples, and reversals. Punches come in light and heavy types with the bigger hits often leading to launches that can in turn lead to mid-air juggles, which are always fun to do. Grapples also come in light and heavy flavours and are exquisitely simple to pull off with speed, damage, and spectacle being the varying factors between the strengths.

Counters are WWE All Stars’ core element of depth. Every grapple has a specific reversal window and you have to be exact with your timing to successfully land one, you cannot spam the button and cross your fingers, however reversals can be reversed as well and while the system ends here it all leads to exuberated whooping and jeering from the players involved as the tug of war keeps swapping sides. Second to these core elements are two meters that build as you fight, one for unblockable super moves and another for a ‘finisher’. The game allows you to pin as normal but most matches end in these all-powerful ‘finisher’ moves, huge attacks that leave a fighter completely unconscious.

This is the key to All Star’s appeal, underneath the WWE adoration and styling lies a solid fighting engine that thrills in its execution and intrigues in its mechanics. Against CPU opponents the bevy of reversals and constant blocking only serves to irritate but against human opponents, preferably offline, the nuances shine through. The poke and test of an early match, brave attempts to fly off the rope, dashing punches, ridiculous high flying grapples and then the nerve shredding end-game with both fighters trying to employ and avoid those devastating finishers. There may be a slight over reliance on the reversal system and grapples, and the focus on three fighter archetypes instead of a cast of truly individual brawlers does reduce the games overall depth, but for a wrestling game, WWE All Stars is stunningly fluid, enthralling, and exciting.

Solo no-no

Good thing too because in terms of content the game is, compared to other wrestling games, strangely slight. For the single player WWE All Stars contains the weakest whisper of a story mode, which is more an arcade mode interspersed with a few cut scenes. Alongside this are the slightly more entertaining fantasy matches that pit WWE Legends against a new blood that bears similarities to their style or performance, with brilliantly edited opening videos that almost make me consider getting interested in the whole wrestling charade. Almost.

It’s simply a shame that once you’re through the handful of matches there’s little reason to return. So it falls to simply enjoying the combat to see the experience last anywhere near as long as it should. You can enjoy WWE All Stars in a smattering of different ways, throwing two, three, or four wrestlers in the ring, sometimes putting a cage around it, sometimes letting them hit each other with objects, and occasionally asking them to work together. It’s an acceptable spread of modes and with a bunch of mates it can entertain for hours at a time. But because of how wrestling games have impressed with their buffets of varied modes in the past, and due to the way most brawlers ultimately act too similarly to one another, you’ll ultimately pine for more than what’s on offer. Indeed WWE All-Stars’ largest failing is its reluctance to truly run with its ridiculous premise.

The wrestlers look suitably silly, and the moves fit the premise, but the environments are all safe, the wrestlers faces creepily un-animated, and the commentary is quite standard fare, even if being delivered by Jerry Lawler and Jim Ross is sure to excite older wrestling fans.

It’s the way these presentational elements do little to live up to the absurd feel that slightly damages the experience as you feel it could have offered so much more had it jumped in with both feet instead of tentatively dipping one toe in the water as it has. But even with all its negatives piled up against it, WWE All Stars still leaps one hundred feet into the air, steak sized mitts glowing with neon energy, as it belly flops onto the mat causing the ground to flex with alarming elasticity and all those negatives are blasted away as you cheer on that steroid-ed beefcake to knock his foe’s lights into the stratosphere.

It’s not perfect, but WWE All Stars is ten times more enjoyable on a raw gameplay level than any WWE game before it, and for all its shortcomings All Stars needs to be a success simply because it deserves to be expanded in a sequel. One thing I do know is that if I’d played this while in school my whole perception of wrestling games would have been completely different, I would have said they were a fun alternative to my ‘proper’ fighters.

7/10 

Words: James Bowden

Formats: PS3, Xbox 360, Wii WWE All Stars release date: out now

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