WWF WrestleMania: The Arcade Game

"WWF makes a pay per view event on the 32-X....but fails to deliever the show..."

As most 32-X games go, you have to be aware that even with the boasting that Sega did with its little money making add-on, it didn't often produce decent games, and most of the games that you found here weren't much better than those featured on the regular Genesis system! Another example of attempting to cash in on a dying system, WWF Wrestlemania was released for the 32-X in hopes of breathing some life into the home console war, but ending up with little more than a brief fight. WWF Wrestlemania offers you all of the action and characters that the arcade did, but with some pretty noticeable problems that start right from the get go! Taking control of one of several different wrestlers that came in the likes of Doink the Clown, The Undertaker and Razor Ramon, you battle through several matches that range from one on one to one on three matches on your way to the WWF Championship gold. However, problems with the combination system, as well as the insane difficulty and the lack of a reliable control interface, WWF Wrestlemania nearly falls on its face!

-Game Play 6/10-

Allowing you access to eight characters, you choose your persona, and go to war in the wrestling ring that gives way to matches in which you're fighting one on one, to one on four. Through this, you make your way through the ranks and then finally to the WWF Championship. The road is long and hard, and some of the matches are so unfairly mismatched, you'll be beating on the control stick before too long!

Other factors of the game play are made up in the ring, in which you use Street Fighter style control motions and then an attack button to pull off some high powered moves. As you do this, your combo bar goes up, and then you can unleash a heavy hitting combination that is so ridiculously done, but ultimately entertaining to watch!

What Sega did with this version of the game, was attempt to make it extremely difficult, which ultimately ended up with the game being too difficult to play in some instances, or, with the change of difficulty, too easy to play! There was no middle ground here, and finding enough time to learn how to work all of the moves and the various, programmed combinations was more or less a pain in the ass when you boiled it all down to brass tacks! Even with the various characters, you're looking at the same game, but with the difficulty jacked up so high, or so low, that it wasn't much fun to play.

-Control 6/10-

Anyone with a right mind would have a six button Genesis controller that they could set to incorporate the different buttons and button combinations that were needed to play through the game effectively! With the stiff directional pad, actually making the combinations connect takes plenty of practice and several minutes of getting used to the button set up in order to use any of the wrestlers effectively. Gamers who have played this game will find that the overall control isn't quite what it is in the arcade, so consider yourself warned!

-Visuals 6/10-

32 X did nothing here to improve the visuals, and if anything, frames of animation and some of the visual effects are missing as well! The wrestlers are all well drawn and designed, but in some instances there are cases of extreme game slow down and character image break up when a heavy combo goes into effect. Anyone will find this rather disturbing and it does take away from the overall display of the game in the worst way!

-Audio 6/10-

Even though most of the music reappears from the arcade version and even some of the sound effects, most of the audio commentary that you might expect to hear isn't present with the hardware limitations of the system! You would figure that the 32-X could reproduce some of the audio portion of the game, and while it does, you can only listen to the announcer yell out that you've put another nail in the coffin {courtesy of NBA Jam by the way} before you reach for the mute button!

-Overall 6/10-

Another one of those games that was produce with the WWF license that got neither the right amount of respect, nor the right amount of attention to its production! With missing visuals, unbalanced game play difficulty, missing sound and effects as well as a hard to use control, anyone who is a fan of this particular version of the WWF series will be disappointed. Wrestling game fans should probably look towards WWF Raw, and even then perhaps look towards a newer system with much more superior games than this one!

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 10/09/01, Updated 10/09/01