Showdown: Legends of Wrestling – PS2 – Review

Ahh, the good, old days. For anyone that’s read my Exitebike
or Scooby Doo review, you know that I’m a nostalgic old fool and that I’m
haunted by an insatiable hunger for all things of my youth. One of the biggest
things of my youth was wrestling. It was an event around my house. Whether it
was staying up late on Saturday nights in the hopes that one of the four
channels we had back then would smile upon me and show the wrestling show they
aired with maddeningly random frequency, with the chance to see Andre the
Giant squash some poor fool a fiftieth of his size or running home from church
as fast as my little legs would pump in order to catch “Wrestling at the
Kiel”. Back then in the days before cable and before the WWF, wrestling and
its shows were hard to come by. Raw, Smackdown, monthly pay per views weren’t
even a glint in the McMahon eyes yet. Nor were the crazy, soap opera style
storylines and the constant changing of titles. There wasn’t a whole lot of
glitz and glamour to be had. The heroes of the day were guys like Bulldog Bob
Brown, Rufus R. Jones, Ken Patera, Ric Flair, the Von Erichs, Dusty Rhodes,
and of course Andre the Giant, among many, many others. Many of the same men
who populate this game.

On paper and in theory, this game should be the be all, end all of
wrestling game. A game that celebrates the roots of this crazy form of
entertainment, a game that features a roster full of the greatest legends of
all time. Unfortunately, as being a lifelong Oakland Raider fan has taught me,
what looks good on paper and in theory, doesn’t always work out, and sometimes
it turns out to be something completely devoid of the massive potential that
it showed. Sadly this is how Showdown ultimately shakes out.

The game starts out great. The roster of greats from almost every era of
wrestling from the past thirty years is well represented here. The list is
long and is without doubt the most impressive roster of wrestlers ever amassed
in a wrestling game. Everyone, no matter if you’re new to wrestling or a fan
reaching back decades you’ll find faces and names immediately recognized and
remembered. Acclaim did an absolutely phenomenal job in amassing the talent in
this game. I cannot possibly say enough good things about this roster. Of
course there are names that some will be disappointed are missing, but
ultimately, no one has any reason to complain about the roster. However, this
is where it all begins to fall apart.

Any wrestling game worth its over shrunk tights, has got to feature strong,
fast, exciting gameplay. Unfortunately, the same problems that have plagued
Acclaim wrestling games ever since they originally gained the former WWF
license, plague this game. The gameplay is sluggish, slow, stiff, and clumsy.
There’s just no nice way to put it. After all these years I still feel that
I’m playing their first wrestling game, albeit with a shiny, new coat of
paint. Virtually every match devolves into a mashing of the “strike” button,
which ultimately proves to be the most worthwhile strategy in the game. The
various grapple and power moves of the wrestlers cannot be pulled off with any
sort of regularity or ease.

Another sore point in the gameplay is that when you’re involved in any
match that involves more than two grapplers, the game becomes an exercise in
futility as the game still features the frustrating mechanic of manually
having to “face” whatever opponent you want to attack. The problem is, it’s
never very clear who you’re facing to attack and more times than not, you’ll
end up attacking your partner or someone you hadn’t intended on attacking.
This gets especially maddening in tag team matches as tagging out to your
partner is far too difficult and cumbersome.

Beyond the problematic gameplay, the game offers the standard modes and
match types. You have a career mode in the Showdown Challenge, versus mode,
and classic match mode which recreates classic matches from throughout the
years. As for match types, it has everything any self-respecting wrestling
game (did I just type that?) features from various configurations of tag
matches, to cage matches, to hardcore matches, to Iron Man matches, they’re
all here, but the gameplay hinders each one.

Graphically is where the game shines the brightest, outside of the roster
itself. The graphics engine displays the wrestlers in a weird combination of
realism and cartoon, that somehow works here. Each and every wrestler is
immediately recognizable and scaled to fairly realistic proportions in
relations to their fellow wrestlers. The arenas and the rings are also well
modeled. I’ve read other reviews complaining about the graphics, but I for one
really like what they’ve done graphically. Wrestling back in the day had far
more in common with Looney Tunes, rather than Days of Our Lives, and I think
the graphical style does a great job of conveying this.

The sound on the other hand, while not quite as bad as the gameplay, is
sub-par, especially the commentary team of Bobby “The Brain” Heenan, Tony
Schiavone, and Larry Zbysko. Truth be told, The Brain, who is a legend in the
“sport” does a fairly good job, but Schiavone and Zbysko are even worse than
their worst from Monday Nitro, and are absolutely pull your teeth bad here. If
they had just left it in the capable hands of The Brain, or at the very least
allowed him to dominate the commentary, things would have faired much better.
But as it is, most gamers will be hitting the mute button faster than Andre
the Giant cleared a buffet. Beyond the commentary, the sound effects and
entrance music are pretty vanilla on the whole. You’ve got standard grunts,
groans, slaps, and punches, as well as crowd noise, but that’s about all you can
say about it. It’s there and does its job. It neither detracts, nor adds to
the experience.

In closing, I really wanted to love this game. As I stated earlier the
roster is second to none and I had high hopes of recreating the matches of my
youth and creating the matches that never were, but a strong roster of
characters is not enough to carry a game, especially a game of this type. But
things are not completely bleak. Acclaim does have a killer roster, as well as
what I feel is pretty good graphics engine. If they tear things completely
down and start from scratch, they could just easily have a world champion on
their hands. With the roster they have, we wrestling fans won’t demand all the
bells and whistles of other wrestling titles, we’d be as happy as George the
Animal Steele with a mouth full of turnbuckle just to be able to put these
wrestlers through the motions with a solid wrestling engine. If they can do
this, especially in today’s wrestling climate (read: frigid and barren),
they’d easily outdo the WWE’s yearly updates. Hopefully Acclaim won’t throw in
the towel just yet, and come roaring back with a title worthy of the wrestlers
that populate their game.

Gameplay: 4.7

Slow and unresponsive best sum it up. The gameplay is in dire need of a
complete makeover. Against the competition of today’s other wrestling games,
it falls woefully short. While the other games have emphasized speed and ease
of pulling off the moves in a wrestler’s repertoire, Showdown is mired in
still trying to make the mechanics of Acclaims original WWF game back on the
PS1.

Graphics: 8.0
Cartoony, bright, and brilliant. The graphical style of this game fit’s
the subject matter as well as Ms. Elizabeth’s old cocktail dresses fit her.
The wrestler model’s are spot on and do a great job of recreating the look and
feel of each individual character. The arenas and rings are also nicely done.

Sound: 5.0

Keep Bobby “The Brain” Heenan and have Schiavone and Zbysko make like WCW
and disappear. The commentary of those two is far and away the worst of any
game, in any genre ever. If it hadn’t been for “The Brain” this score would
fared much worse. The rest of the sound is very plain, but serviceable.

Difficulty: Easy

Far too easy in the sense that you can win virtually every match by
repeatedly pounding the “strike” button. The control issues however can tend
to make some things frustratingly difficult.

Concept: 8.5

The idea of rounding up legends of wrestling from the past thirty years and
throwing them into the same game is brilliant. So many of these legends never
had the opportunity to face each other due to factors such as age and
organizational commitments, but in the world of Legends of Wrestling those
things no longer matter. This concept gives this franchise a great deal of
hope, but for it to realize its considerable potential, the game is going to
have to be rebuilt from the ground up.

Multiplayer: 4.5

The game supports the PS2 mulit-tap which is a plus in my book, but
unfortunately the gameplay problems are only exacerbated by playing with
friends.