Publisher: Acclaim Entertainment

Developer: Acclaim Studios Austin

Category: Sports

Release Dates

N Amer - 06/22/2004

Official Game Website

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Showdown: Legends of Wrestling 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.

Overall: 5.0
Ultimately, every other wrestling game on the market surpasses this game. From the various WWE games, to the Ultimate Muscle games, to Fire Pro Wrestling, they all have much more to offer, simply because they have compelling, functional gameplay to support the game. None of those games can match Showdown’s roster, but in the world of games, gameplay is king. The idea of being able to play with these various legends is alluring and may be enough to entice a purchase out of some of you, but you’d be much better served by saving your money and crossing your fingers for inevitable follow up to bring it all together for an outstanding grappler. The potential is most certainly there, two of the biggest hurdles in gaming have already been cleared with compelling characters and nice visuals. But the biggest remains: GAMEPLAY
.

GameZone Reviews

5.0

GZ Rating

Gameplay4.7
Graphics8
Sound5
DifficultyEasy
Concept8.5
Multiplayer4.5
Overall5.0

Large, overly muscled, sweaty men of yore wrasslin’ in their Underoos can only mean one thing, Showdown: Legends of Wrestling has been unleashed.

Reviewer: The Bearer

Review Date: 08/19/2004


Avg. Web Rating

6.0

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