Wrestling was better in the eighties and early nineties, wasn’t it? You could have Hulk Hogan shamelessly beating a man loosely dressed as an Iraqi soldier during the first Gulf War, and everyone wore tons of face paint. It’s just long enough ago to look back on with a set of beautiful rose-tinted nostalgia glasses. That’s the thinking behind Legends of Wrestlemania, with the ex-federation’s marketing division leaving no potential revenue stream untapped. The pitch is simple: retro wrestlers, straightforward gameplay.
It’s instantly apparent that Legends revels in the yesteryear. There’s a swathe of archive footage incorporated into catchy pre-match montages all throughout the game’s main tour mode, giving you the pre-match hype build-up alongside choice moments from the pay-per-view Wrestlemania events. If you’re not familiar with Wrestlemania, all you need to know is it’s the pièce de résistance of the wrestling universe. This quirky addition is an incontestable positive, hyping up the game’s retro features and hammering you with a deluge of history. It’s an elbow drop of reminiscence landing right in your face.
Chief among the tour modes is the ‘Relive’ mode, where you re-enact a cornucopia of wrestling highlights while the game ranks you on pulling off certain prescribed moves throughout the match. It effectively affords the game a stronger sense of rigidity over its predecessors, simultaneously indoctrinating the unfamiliar into the annals of the WWE and allowing the familiar to drink in the history. It also jazzes everything up a bit, encourages you to get out of the ring and try out tactics you wouldn’t normally consider.
And there are some good ones in here, too: Hulk Hogan’s victories over King Kong Bundy, Andre the Giant and Sgt. Slaughter in Wrestlemania II, III and VII alongside his loss to Ultimate Warrior in Wrestlemania VI. Then the clock goes forward a bit and you’re in Wrestlemania XIII, pummeling “Stone Cold” Steve Austin as Bret “The Hitman” Hart before turning it around and playing Stone Cold’s matches against Shawn “HBK” Michaels and The Rock in Wrestlemania XIV and XV.
But those seven bouts are it. It’s unfortunate because it’s easily the best part of the game, though it’s entirely possible to blast through the sparse offerings a meager couple of hours, leaving you with the six ‘Rewrite’ and ‘Redefine’ matches that revolve around the same gimmick only without any of the flair. Another downside is that the moves become increasingly arbitrary, demanding you perform feats like three taunts (instead of one) and two finishers (again, instead of one) in a desperate bid to artificially lengthen a remarkably short experience.
The back-to-basics attitude is clearly a good way to rope fresh players into the world of wrestling, but the clear positive here is shedding SVR2009’s ridiculously complex control scheme and move sets. Smackdown Vs Raw has bogged itself down in increasingly redundant minutiae, diluting the experience to an irreconcilable mess. Legends is all about simplification and basking in cheesy nostalgia. It’s all the better for it.
But it’s not challenging. Sure, it’s undeniably easy to get to grips with, and I imagine accessibility way a key term tossed around design meetings, but the entirety of the design is simplistic to the point of redundancy. The face buttons are neatly mapped out, with one button handling grapples, one for punches, and another for blocks. The leftover button handles the miscellany: turnbuckles, pins, picking up stuff. The game handily chips in with a bit of advice on the player’s first instance of all these moves, too. But it’s so basic it feels remedial: they’ve now designed the diametric opposite to the convoluted mess of SVR2009’s control scheme. While painfully accessible is preferable to distressingly complex, there’s still the same unshakable feeling that something’s just not quite right.
Despite the simplicity, the game retains its arsenal of jazzy moves thanks to a hearty inclusion of quick time events and button mashing sequences. The quick time events are nothing complex and are achieved by walking up to a groggy opponent and tapping the grapple button. Your biggest chance of failure in these sequences is brain-numbing monotony, at least against the computer. Against a human opponent you both receive the button flash on the screen, and it’s the first person to press it that wins. It’s an adequate system, although online gameplay has a painfully apparent host advantage.
The quick time event grapples are probably the bread and butter move, with the game offering you comparatively big rewards for such a simplistic action. Most matches play out by waiting for the opponent to attack, reversing his punch and then launching a chain grapple. Repeat, repeat, repeat. The bonus conferred by this is a healthy charge of the super meter, which happily increases to a maximum level of three and can be spend on devastating finishing moves, health-regenerating taunts or simply retained to deploy flashier grapple moves.
The trouble is that it’s just not very engaging. Legends is fun for about an hour, sure, but the appeal quickly wanes. It’s too simple to be of any challenge, which means you’ll have extracted all the achievements and utterly annihilated the computer in about two days. It also makes it particularly unsuitable for playing against friends.
The tedium is shown to full effect in the Legend Killer mode, where you construct a Do-It-Yourself wrestler from the game’s famously extensive customization screen and pit it against tiers of ten famous wrestlers. There’s none of the checklist gameplay from the other modes here, with the objective simply to batter your opponent into submission. It’s here the excessively repetitive nature of the game reveals itself. The game offers you up plenty of moves to deploy, but you’ll only ever end up cycling through three or four because they’re clearly the most powerful.
For SVR2009 owners there’s the added bonus of it being able to import your save across to access an even larger roster and your already-created characters, but that doesn’t stop the game from being any more repetitive. It hasn’t progressed too far from SVR2009’s amateur design, either: the graphics are still terrible, the animations clumsy and the controls unresponsive. Legends of Wrestlemania attempts to be a progressive evolution of the series disguised in retro garb, but ultimately it ends up wrought with its own set of inexcusably fatal flaws.
Popularity: 1% [?]
