The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

I really wanted to try WWE All Stars.

This seems weird to me, but I don’t know. The quick look on Giant Bomb just made it look crazy insane and flat-out fun, and I have been subjected to so much wrestling stuff through a certain person (*cough*Joe Drilling*cough*) that I was just really interesting. Luckily, this is exactly what Gamefly is for, so I put it on the list to try it.

Personally, I think WWE All Stars is a fantastic game. There are things to say about it that are negative, I guess. The art style on the characters is kind of weird, to be sure, but I don’t think it isn’t fitting for caricatures of wrestlers. I suppose most wrestling games have a complex character maker mode? This one has a shitty one bolted on. Again, I feel that’s okay, because this is much more a “fighting game” than what wrestling games normally are, from what I understand.

If you come into it with that “fighting game” mentality, which I did, the game works fantastically like that. You have dudes with special moves and combos that you can pick from. The action is very fast-paced and completely ridiculous, with you being able to do things like short air juggles and basically slamming people to the ground so hard they rocket into the air. They’re trying to make the game fun, and less what wrestling actually is and more what the wrestling in your mind would be. It totally works. I dig it.

I did have problems with it, though, which is why I didn’t play very long on it. For people who are actual wrestling fans, or just fans of other genres, I don’t think these would be much of an issue.

The first issue was targeting. You get to do these matches that have more than one other opponent in there. You switch between targets with the right stick. I never got the hang of this. I just found it kind of frustrating. Why couldn’t I just grab the dude in front of me? Plus it seemed to cycle, and it just took forever to change the focus to where I wanted it. I feel like wrestling people probably deal with this all the time, and are used to it. “Full” wrestling games probably have this. It’d be fine for them. It just didn’t work for me.

Still, I could get used to that. The part I couldn’t get used to was how counter-based this game is. Now, don’t get me wrong: an active counter system makes PERFECT sense for wrestling, and adds a lot of skill to the game. But fuck, I am always terrible at games that required timed counters. I tried, I really tried, to counter stuff. But once the opponents got hard enough that I had to counter them to have a chance at beating them? I no longer beat them. I just couldn’t do it. I am not that kind of gamer. That was it.

It’s not a game for me. But it really seems like a fun game. I dunno if I’d pay full price for it, knowing the stupid amount of features that are in the normal, “full” wrestling games? But for a fan who picked this up for like… 30 bucks? That’d be a damn, damn good purchase. It’s exciting and arcadey and I am glad I tried it.