WWF: Road To Wrestlemania: It Ain't Wrestlemania XL, That's For Sure!

15/04/24

As I write this, I’ve just finished watching Night Two of Wrestlemania XL. Wrestling, at least in the last 6-7 months, has become a massive hyperfixation for me, something that energizes and excites me and gets me through the real hard days. Wrestlemania XL is amazing, a dawn of a new era for WWE, and wrestling has a whole. I won’t spoil it, but if you’ve heard even an inkling about the storylines leading into this year’s Wrestlemania, this is unmissable TV. If only I could say the same for WWF: Road to Wrestlemania. If only my reception and feelings for this GBA in name only wrestling game weren’t the utter opposite of the sheer feelings of elation I felt today. I love wrestling, so, so much - but this is genuinely some of the worst I’ve encountered thus far on the Game Boy Advance.

As I’ve said, I *love* wrestling. The perfect blend of guys and gals beating the ever loving shite out of each other, and soap opera-esque writing featuring people who could tear me in half. What’s not to love? And, with this review coming out near Wrestlemania XL (note: I forgot to upload this until a week had passed), I was super excited to see what the GBA had to offer in regards to solid wrestling games, though I was smart enough to temper my expectations at least a bit. Man, sometimes, it’s games like this that made me fear looking forward to *any* Game Boy Advance game I haven’t played before. Yeah. It’s *that* bad.

Let’s jump the bones of the problem, being the very bones that make up this immensely, frustratingly terrible game. WWF’s gameplay is incredibly basic, yet somehow manages to be clunky enough to be frustrating as all hell. It feels like an incredibly stripped down version of the classic Wrestling games of the N64 era, but with none of the complexity and all of the inherent clunkiness. Whilst it has the same general pace - punch and kick your opponent a bunch, before grappling them and hitting a certain button combination to perform certain moves, culminating in hitting your finisher to pin and win the match. In theory, it should just be a more basic version of that, but the sheer fact of the matter is that the game just *does not work*. Playing as Kane (my OG fave as a kid), most of my time felt like it was spent kicking my opponent in the shins, stunning him for only the briefest moments, but every time I went into a grapple to try and land a move, it was a coin flip whether anything would happen, that’d I’d land my move, or my opponent would just reverse it and hit me instead. I looked at guides, I watched a youtube video or two, but I just couldn’t work out how to make this game work for me. Maybe I, and everyone I looked up, are just idiots, but I feel it’s more likely on the game. So, in the end, most of my time was spent kicking my opponents in the shins and failing my grapples, ultimately leading me to be worn down and pinned with no idea in regards to any kind of recourse. Oh boy.

Even if I managed to land some of my moves, it never came together for me in any fight’s endgame. Y’see, our energy and general status is represented by three green bars in the top corner of the screen, and this genuinely might be the most befuddling element of the game as a whole. From what I’ve gathered from guides and whatnot - my only real source beyond the game itself, as I don’t have access to a manual, and finding one online seems impossible - landing more hits, grapples, and genuinely doing well will raise the various bars, and upon all three being as tall as possible, you can hit your finisher upon grappling your opponent, and hitting a button combination. And, oh boy, if it was frustrating to even land the most basic grapples, imagine being in the position to win and you can’t get the Tombstone Piledriver you oh-so desperately need to close out the match. Suffice to say, I’m glad I didn’t stream this one, because it is INFURIATING.

And sure, this is a basic GBA game, but the fact that there is no Create-A-Wrestler, a feature that is as intertwined with wrestling games as, well, wrestling itself, feels almost like a cardinal sin in itself. Seriously, they could’ve even had a basic creator where you’re just swapping parts between the already included wrestlers - imagine, the head of Stone Cold Steve Austin, and the body of TAZ. Horrifying. To be fair, it’s not like you’re getting a huge variety of content without it, anyway; there’s not even a basic level of variance between each wrestler, sans their finishing moves. The career mode is the same, just fighting through generic matches with seemingly random wrestlers, all leading towards a chance at the WWF Championship at Wrestlemania X-7. That’s it. Gripping stuff. There are, thankfully, at least a couple of match types to play around with, like the Royal Rumble, or Triple Threat matches, but when saddled with the fact that just adding more wrestlers to the ring doesn’t really improve anything, are these really boons? Honestly, the sheer fact that in a Triple Threat match, if the other two wrestlers are in a grapple or anything, you might as well chill out ‘till they’re done, as they become utterly impervious to anything you can do to them. Just… just great game design, my guys.

There’s just really not much reason to play around with this game. Sure, I could see a kid, in the early 2000s, who has no idea about any other wrestling games or… well, *how* to actually play video games well having a good time playing this like smashing wrestling toys together, but beyond that? I mean, there are several other wrestling games for the GBA, and even if they’re quality is in doubt, I think it's good money that they aren’t nearly as sloppy and flat out unfun as this one is.

If I have *anything* good to say about the game is that a lot of the presentation is actually pretty solid. Not so much in the graphics section, which is… serviceable, even if it looks like it has more in common with a Game Boy Colour game than anything else. It’s primitive, but it’s charming enough, and seriously, I’m looking for a win anywhere here. One thing I do genuinely love, though, is that we have excellent, chiptune-ified renditions of a *ton* of classic wrestler entrances, condensed down but still absolutely recognizable. Hearing a barely understandable rendition of ‘Can you smell, what the Rock is cooking?’ or Kane’s dramatic, foreboding themes ecked a grin out of me, even as my morale for this game was hitting an all-time low.

Honestly? My seething rage towards this game could be the definition of ‘skill issue’, but judging by even FAQs for the game raking it over the coals for its issues, I’m willing to err on the side of blaming the game. Road To Wrestlemania might stick out for its decent visuals and actually pretty great, bite-sized entrances, but it is a cheap, borderline broken experience that I can’t recommend, even as a newly minted diehard wrestling fan. A cursory glance at a let’s play will tell you everything you need to know, but man, even hearing about what the Rock Is Cooking doesn’t make me want to even think about this game ever, ever, again. Only time I’ll be hearing some glass shattering, will be after I toss this through my window. All right, all right, I’ll stop.

Thank you so much for reading my review of WWF: The Road To Wrestlemania. Sorry about the late review - I wanted this out the same time as Wrestlemania XL, but I had a convention that weekend, and then I was up to 1am catching up on Wrestlemania’s first night, and by the time I’d actually started drafting this out and everything, I just felt it was better to leave the review a week. In any case, next week we’ll be tackling a game that was a genuinely great surprise, and one of those actually quality games that I feel like I’ve never seen anyone talk about. As always, you can find me on Twitter @Lemmy7003, email at me mgeorge7003@hotmail.com, or find me on Twitch under GameBoyAbyss. Thanks again for reading, and I’ll see you in my next review.