Backyard Wrestling: Don't Try This at Home

"Not all that great"

Intro

This game is based on the Backyard Wrestling series of videos. It features the members of the Insane Clown Posse’s wrestling league, JCW and even a few professional wrestlers such as Sabu from the now defunct ECW.

Game play

The controls are pretty basics on this game because it’s a lot like Raw 2 for Xbox. Otherwise for climbing up stuff like ladders or buildings you just walk next to it and I will automatically go all the way up which is kind of lame, it would be cooler if you could do a jump kick or something halfway up. The coolest thing about the arenas is that you can virtually pick up any weapons or items. The items are really cool because they go from bricks to wrenches to even manikins. The weapons themselves have their own combos if you hold the A button with them. Of course they got interactions in the game (the people in talk show mode) they’ll do some crap to you like the barbeque guy will roast you and one guy will shoot his blow torch at you if you manage to bother them enough. The only thing I really hated about this game is that it is only up to two players, and all the major moves don’t yield as much damage off your opponents life bar as you’d hope. Weapons can do more damage if you throw them quick enough. Otherwise the game play is very good. Reversing moves is hard, but easy, you get a split second to do it when your wrestler is flashing in the middle of the move, but if they pick you up form the ground you get two chances and it is fairly easy to do a reversal.

There are only five game modes: Talk Show, Vs, Survivor, Tag, and King of the Hill. Talk show mode is pretty cool, mainly it’s like a story mode where you go through so many opponents to get to a boss. In talk show the only bad thing is that if there is four enemies to clear in the arena, you have to beat all of them separately, if you lose once you have to play them all over again. Otherwise the movies are cool because all the stupid opponents come on the talk show and say they hate backyard wrestling. After the cut scene, you fight in their home arena. Tag is just doing a move to each other and having someone being it for so long in order to lose. It isn’t too much fun but it’s alright. Survivor sucks because you fight everyone in the game, which doesn’t sound bad because you fight them separately but say you lose 20% of your life on one guy you will start at 90% the next round and eventually you get screwed over. King of the Hill is a kind of cool mode because you want to throw the enemy out of a little square that you are in and stay in the area by yourself at all costs. Whoever gets 1:30 there first is the winner.

Graphics

The graphics for the overall game are pretty well done; except for the intros the screen is kind of choppy. The moves look a little like DefJam Vendetta for GameCube if you ever played it, but then again they do a lot of that stuff while wrestling. What’s weird is there isn’t a whole lot of moves but a lot of them have very well animated. They don’t have all that clipping from doing a certain move like in most wrestling games where there bodies go through each other. Overall the graphics are the best I have seen in a while because blood will gush form the body or even other things like their hair will move.

Sound

Sound is pretty basic with nothing really special to the standard kicks, and slams you hear throughout gameplay, unless you blow up a gas tank or something. One cool thing is the 41 song soundtrack they have on the game which you can also copy to your hard drive. You can also upload your own songs too with custom soundtracks. That’s about it, there is no voice acting in the game unless they win they say a catch phrase, on in the Talk Show mode cut scenes.

Create a Player

This is actually one of the worst I have ever seen. There are 15 different body types; with these bodies you have about 11 different costumes on each body type. The thing that really sucks too is that there are only about three original outfits for each body. Other outfits have mainly a few tattoos or color shirts, and a lot of the bodies suck except for about four, but compared to the regular guys they look retarded. They don’t have anyway to make your guy do more damage or anything either, which totally ruins the Create a Player. Overall, that’s about it and you pick fighting style and moves, but like I said earlier there are only eight different moves you can pick.

Replay Value

I definitely think this game is good, but only against the computer, and occasionally trying survivor. The story mode is fun the first time through, but after that beating it just seems to be a chore. The best thing is going up against the computer and trust me, don’t bother putting them on a harder difficulty because they reverse everything! Overall I would still buy it to play again and again but vs. a friend. NOT FRIENDS BECAUSE OF LACK OF 3 OR 4 PLAYER SUPPORT!!!

End

Overall I Would probably buy this game if you have your friends over a lot otherwise I would just rent it because it can get very boring right away. I am giving this an 7 overall, mainly just because it is only 2 players, and the Create-a-Wrestler sucks.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 10/21/03