WCW/NWO Revenge

"Revenge is Sweet"

Introduction

With wrestling entertainment at its peak in the late nineties videogame developer THQ put all of the action from the Monday Nitro action straight into a well developed wrestling game featuring a long roster of World Championship Wrestling and New World Order stars as well as introducing us to new and nonexistant factions of wrestlers to test our favorite star against these new faces. WCW/NWO Revenge is a stepping stone of excellent videogame development from the previous title of World Tour and the ultimate of perfection in WWF No Mercy. The game play is so unique to wrestling games and features a simple, but complex move system that totally replaces the punch button combinations of regular fighting games which were also the pain of some of the early WWF games. The graphics are not as realistic as the competition was able to capture in games like Warzone, but the easy layout of the control scheme helped to make this one of the best wrestling games next to the arcade wrestling hits of way back when. This is most definitely World Championship Wrestling at it's finest on the console platform.

Championships 7

The single player or cooperative tag team player schemes get a little repetitive as it is with most wrestling games. The fun features of bashing your opponent in the head with a chair will get you disqualified so you must go through about nine opponents to win a belt. What is cool is that the scoring system is saved to the game so after going back and playing through the championship again I was able to see my score from years and years ago when I had smashed through a championship with Goldberg. But playing against your AI controlled opponent does get repetitive. Every fight follows the same format where you have to wear your opponent down with small moves and then follow them up with power moves and your wrestler's special move. You will be interrupted a few times with an outside attacker who comes running in to rescue your opponent. You can easily dispatch this random attacker who will go outside of the ring once he has had enough. Then you can continue to wear down your opponent to win the match. The good thing about this repetitive play is that the matches can be finished in under three minutes and you face up to ten opponents. So it does not take long to win a championship.

Gaming 10

There are so many features with Revenge that really help to enhance the THQ wrestling experience. What is so great about this particular style is the controls in which you perform moves. The two main features are your attack and grapple. Instead of hitting combinations of buttons like a 2-D arcade fighting game the moves are set up in a complex combination system for easy and effective control. Instead of Down, Up, Left, Right, A, B, Up, Down and so on, you have a simple grapple A and any direction on control pad to perform a specific move. The controls are much simpler than ordinary wrestling and fighting games but that is not all of the great features of this game. You will be able to go outside of the ring and seek some hardware assistance in the form of chairs and other items to inflict some hardcore melee in a non-DQ match. The matches themselves have plenty of options if you play in the Exhibition mode although no special matches exist beyond the standard matches of wrestling. The fighting also focuses on parts of the body that you can wear down on. Bashing your opponent in the head will cause him to bust open and hold his head and that becomes a weak point for your advantage to take and you can use a hold on that part of the body to make your opponent submit. This gives WCW/NWO Revenge a very realistic feel to a game that breaks away from the conventional ways of doing your standard wrestling games. Revenge is simple in control and realistic in appearance which makes this one of the ultimate wrestling multiplayer games around. You can play up to four and have a cooperative Tag Team Championship as well as compete up to four on different types of Exhibition games like Battle Royal. No more than four people will be in the ring at the same time so an all out warfare of wrestlers is not going to happen in this game. But given some real competition between friends will have you sweating it out and putting your favorite wrestler to the test against more meaty foes. The AI is still unpredictable in a lot of ways with plenty of opportunity for moves to be blocked or reversed so the challenge of Revenge is up there to a degree.

Graphics/Sound 8

The graphics and sound do suffer with makeshift cardboard crowds and generic entrance music. The audience around the ring is 2-D and not very well placed. The backdrops to your different wrestling arenas are not very well set either with the wrestlers usually coming out from behind a box for their entrance. And then you have some generic entrance music that consists of only two tracks so a match between four wrestlers will repeat the music after every other wrestler that comes out. Revenge is not the perfected game, but it definitely improved a little in this area. The graphics are somewhat disputed between realistic and not so realistic. What this game focuses on more is the better game play you get out of it rather than the graphics although I feel the graphics are not bad at all. I would not think the wrestlers are realistic and they may seem kind of “blocky” to some although the characters' faces are greatly detailed by each personality and likeness. The graphics definitely do not take away from the excellent game play that Revenge has to offer, but the sound surely does not help Revenge. The music is generic and not memorable at all. There is little to no dialogue or voice work for this game. The only things beside the referee in the game that I remember involving dialogue are the opening scene where a truck driver goes “What?” in a roadblock set up by Sting, and then of course the Macho Man Randy Savage does his “Oh Yeah” when his special move is up.

Replay Value 10

Despite the graphics and the somewhat repetitive AI matches you wrestle Revenge has a very good match pace and keeps your experience in a reasonable time frame. Not only that but you will definitely spend or have spent a lot of time with friends or siblings playing this game. It is very fun, and especially very addictive with its simple controls. Once you have completed all of the championships, you may be tempted to replay them again to earn a higher score. The scoring system is saved to the game itself so that you can go back and look at what your highest score was some ten years ago. That was definitely neat to see when I had found that out when I was replaying this game to review. Fun definitely transcends age with this game and it is still as fun as playing it some ten years ago. Characters can also be switched around and you do get the opportunity to customize any of the wrestlers with different costumes and colors. One of my favorite things to do was to create a random tournament bracket with only the CPU playing and seeing who could win those tournaments. So Revenge is also a game that you can get very creative with and is something you can tinker around with to fully customize it into your own unique game.

Final Recommendation 8.75/10

Welcome to the New World Order of wrestling games. Revenge is the second stepping stone for THQ development that improves tremendously from World Tour and is perfected by the time No Mercy rolled out. The game play is the driving force behind what makes this game and others in this particular series of games so unique and so fun to play. You can spend hours, or just a few minutes and still be able to come back and have fun with this game. And the answer to the pending question is quite obvious. This is a must own game for any old school WCW fan. This game was out long before the WWE buyout of WCW and so some transfer favorites like Chris Benoit and Eddie Guerrero along with Rey Mysterio, The Giant and Hulk Hogan are in this game. This was a great time for WCW when it was at its peak in competition for your Monday nights between Nitro and Raw is War so it is a great game to have relive some of those old school times when every adolescent and teenager was into wrestling. Like any other sports game, this is obviously a dated game, but it is still worth the buy and a part of your Nintendo 64 collection.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 08/11/08

Game Release: WCW/NWO Revenge (US, October 1998)