Review: WWE Legends of WrestleMania

Legends of WrestleMania is going to divide opinion. It's the gaming equivalent of the Ultimate Warrior; some will love it and will overlook it's shortcomings and instead extol it's virtues at every opportunity, whereas others will recognise it for being nothing more than a shallow excuse for wrestling.

Perhaps the most important aspect of Legends of WrestleMania to point out at this early stage is that the control scheme is much more simplistic than the recent Smackdown vs Raw titles. Just because a control scheme is more simplistic, however, does not necessarily mean it is any more accessible.

Legends of WrestleMania uses only the face buttons of the controller to initiate blocks, strikes, grapples and reverses. Quite why it was determined that people are not able to use the four buttons on the top of the controller, or how having to press Y and B simultaneously to perform a taunt is easier than pulling the right trigger, is beyond me. And what LoW gained in making the control scheme easy to remember for casual gamers, it lost immediately by introducing Quick Time Events during the action.

The People’s B,Y,X

Whenever you initiate a chain grapple sequence (a sequence of moves that often results in a powerful move to finish the sequence off), you are presented with button combinations flashing up on the screen. If the attacker inputs each command first, they deal a powerful combo. If your opponent inputs a command first, it reverses the move. The trouble with this is twofold. Number one is that QTEs have never, in any of the games I have ever played, been fun or added anything meaningful to the experience and that, generally, gamers agree that the sooner developers stop using them the better. The second problem is that casual gamers don’t know where the Y button or B button is on the controller, and therefore have to flick their eyes down to see what button they need to press. Obviously during this time the other person (or AI) has pressed the right button.

Executing chain moves are the quickest way of filling your momentum meter. There are three levels to the momentum meter, and each affects the type of moves your wrestler will perform, with more powerful moves becoming available the further up the momentum meter you are (with finishing moves available at the highest level). There are also four taunts, each one bestowing a different time-limited effect on the wrestler, from moves being irreversible to gaining more momentum. The trouble here is that there are so few moves available (I could only ever find three different grappling moves in each of the three momentum tiers) that matches often start with multiple headlocks for a while, interspersed with a few punches and kicks, and then move on to atomic drops and then on to body slams, until you’ve built up enough momentum to unleash a finishing move.

These finishing moves also succumb to the evil QTE, and often result in the player not being able to watch the onscreen action as they’re too busy waiting to see what button they have to press next. If you successfully perform a finishing move, your momentum meter drops back down to zero. Therefore if your opponent manages to kick out (as the AI opponents often do) you’re back to performing headlocks or other weak moves until you build it up again. It can be annoying for Andre The Giant to kick out of Ultimate Warriors Guerrilla Press (there is no weight detection in LoW outside of the WrestleMania mode) and body splash, only to then instantly submit to a headlock or leglock.

After a few exhibition matches to get used to the controls, it’s fair to say that the action left me feeling under whelmed and wondering what could have been. But then I ventured into the WrestleMania Tour mode, and, almost against my will and better judgement, I started to get excited. Being able to relive the Hulk Hogan vs Andre The Giant match reminded me of being young again. When the pre-bout video played, suddenly I was eight, sitting on the sofa all bleary eyed watching WrestleMania III on the TV with my Dad, while my Mum was telling me I had to go to bed because it was school tomorrow. Then Hulk Hogan body slammed Andre and got the three count, which resulted in me not being able to sleep a wink that night. When I then got the option to play as the Ultimate Warrior against Hulk Hogan, in a Title vs Title match, and his music hit, I was again escorted back to the days where I’d sit aghast at the TV, watching this charismatic powerhouse light up my screen. On both occasions I was too young and wrapped up in the emotion and spectacle of it all to realise that both matches were abysmal in terms of wrestling, and far from classics. Strangely it all happened again, whereby suddenly I didn’t really care that the gameplay wasn’t actually that great, that there wasn’t much challenge and that the QTE events should be taken out the back and given a Boogeyman gimmick to finish them off once and for all. I managed to overlook the shortcomings, purely because I was having a bloody good time.

Relive, Redefine and Rewrite wrestling history

The WrestleMania Tour comprises of three different types of bouts. Relive involves you reliving the actions of the victorious wrestler. Rewrite lets you take control of the person that originally lost the match (for instance, Bret Hart vs Yokozuna) and rewrite the record books, and Redefine has you taking part in contests that now have a stipulation thrown in, such as Andre the Giant vs Big John Studd in a Hell in a Cell contest.

Each of the bouts has a number of objectives that you have to complete in order to achieve a Gold medal. In Relive, these are often particular highlights from the original contest (such as Hulk Hogan’s body slam on Andre or Bret Harts Figure Four Leglock around the ring post). In Rewrite and Redefine however, they are often more generic, with objectives such as landing five consecutive blows without taking damage, and performing two finishing moves. The issue here is that most of the bouts require you to obtain the same objectives, and that performing two finishing moves and three taunts artificially extends the length of the bout, to the point of tedium.

Outside of the WrestleMania Tour, there is a Legends mode that pits a created legend up against ten legends consecutively, with only a small amount of health regained in-between bouts. It’s in this mode that the atrocious AI becomes more apparent. For some reason, the lack of challenge in the WrestleMania Tour wasn’t that much of an issue for me. The challenge was more in completing the objectives, than in defeating my opponent. But in Exhibition and Legends matches, the lack of challenge is very noticeable.

Finishing off ten legends is not an issue, and I never once had my health meter drop below halfway. Using a combination of three chain-grapples and just a splattering of punches, and hitting the finisher, I manage to defeat most of the wrestlers within 90 seconds, without ever sustaining any damage. By the time I had to face all of the legends within the game one after another (the sixth and final tier of the Legends mode), my created legend, Campman, with a lovely set of pink tights and a green feather boa, was so levelled up that he was almost completely untouchable, and I was struggling to make bouts last longer than a minute.

The main issue with the AI is that they seldom reverse any moves and it is far too easy to block any grapple attempts that they make. When I tried upping the difficulty to Legendary and defeated Andre with Koko B Ware, and with Andre’s offence limited to just two strike attacks and a botched chain grapple, I decided to give up on single player and decided to go online. But it was here that the relative ease of reversing grapple attempts became even more prevalent. I connected with five grapple attempts, my opponent connected with two, and the rest of the bout involved us giving up on grapples and both trading strike attacks instead until, after about three minutes, I pinned my opponent after a very weak blow to the head.

What a rush

There’s no doubt that with a little more refinement of the control system, more depth and more intelligent AI, that Legends of WrestleMania would have been a huge and deserved hit. The WrestleMania tour mode delivers in terms of nostalgia value and watching the video footage of the original bout before replicating the action brings you that much closer to the game. But there are just too many shortcomings that point to Legends of WrestleMania being rushed.

There are those that will love this game; those that don’t mind the lack of challenge and depth and just want to become their favourite wrestlers of yesteryear. If you’re one of those you can completely ignore the score below. But if you like your games with a challenge, if you want more depth, and want a multiplayer experience that doesn’t degenerate into strike attacks, then unfortunately Legends of WrestleMania is unlikely to be for you.