"Once again, XBox owners get an atrocious game."

My, my. It seems that XBox owners are the unloved children of THQ. After two unimpressive attempts at giving us a WWE game to boast about, THQ decided a new developer was in order to help. And were they third time lucky?

Not in the slightest.

WWE WrestleMania XXI is every bit as terrible as the two games that came before it. Is it really that hard to give us a decent WWE game? Apparently so. I'm going to break this review up into several sections, as some aspects of the game are actually above terrible.

1. GRAPHICS - (7/10).
Pretty graphics are something that XBox owners have always been blessed with in their WWF/E games. Indeed, even Raw's 1 and 2 had an excellent visual style. WMXXI is no different. Although the graphics are not other the "blow you away" variety, the superstars are sufficiently well realised to be impressive.

If there is one drawback of the graphics, it will be the pyro, which is beyond awful. You know how every WWF/E game right back to N64 has managed to make Kane's pyro seem impressive? Well welcome to WWE WMXXI: the first game to screw that up. Pyro has absolutely no substance to it. It looks overly pixellated and completely lacklustre.

2. CREATE-A-WRESTLER - (3/10).
CAW is something that has been steadily declining in WWE games for a while. It seemed to reach its pinnacle in WWE SD:HCTP. WMXXI continues to recent disturbing trend of being, quite frankly, a waste of disc space. In any CAW feature, if you felt like altering your superstars name or intro, you'd expect to be able to do it right? WRONG! Not in WMXXI, baby! No, here, once these attributes are set, they're there to stay! Following this ludicrous piece of programming is an equally inept move set creation tool, where the moves are limited in selection and - the best bit - it doesn't tell you which controls the move are mapped to!!!! Studio Gigante ensure that they keep you guessing right to the very end!! The clothes textures are also awful, and there is a painfully limited selection of hairstyles, etc.

Sound in CAW is equally dire - though they make use of the hard drive ripping feature from Raw 2 (which was an excellent idea) you actually CANNOT select any WWE superstar's music! That's right!

3. SOUND - (3/10).
As with other recent WWE games, there are the generic rock tracks that they've had licensed since DoR last year. And by now, they're starting to get pretty tiresome. Though most of the WWE superstars music is featured here, since you'll only here it during that superstar's intro, you're stuck with that rock. It'll probably only take you 10 minutes before you get so annoyed you mute it.

4. SHOZONE - (1/10).
Shop zone is a feature you will wish they'd not even bothered with. For every match you win in the game's story mode, you'll get maybe $2000. Considering items in the shop zone cost upwards of $150,000, it won't be long before you get so bored with trying to unlock them that you just give up.

5. GAMEPLAY - (3/10).
And now we get to the meat of the game. For all the insane things you've heard so far, one might be able to forgive them if the game play was out-of-this-world... IF the game play was out-of-this-world.

Unfortunately it's not.

The AI in this game is every bit as stupid as Raw 2. The CPU has one game plan, and one only - get you on the floor, then slap on 5 or 6 submission moves until it gets an ultra-cheap win. In Royal Rumble matches it will ignore easy wins with other characters just to go after you. After a few turns, you will find this extremely annoying.

Add to this the fact that though this is an XBOX game, the game actually SLOWS down at certain points when there are too many people in the ring. It also slows down at replays at the end of matches, which is something that will have your heart in your mouth due another irritating glitch; the game crashes constantly.

Make sure you save often with this, because otherwise several hours of work will be instantly wiped when one of the many crashes occurs.

Plus, you must always make sure you have your profile activated. If you forget to, you will lose any money you might have gained in a match. Also, of the several unlockable things in this game, some non-genius, for some reason, decided that people would need to go on XBox Live to unlock them.

So, for people who don't have live (and have no need to get it now with the imminent arrival of XBox 2), they can't even unlock a quarter of what they should be able to. What a stupid, stupid idea.

The story mode, while reasonably well written, if peppered with the most glitches, as the game freezes during random intervals and deletes all of your hard work.

6. VERDICT - (2/10).
Overall, considering they delayed this game to fix glitches, they seem to have done nothing during the delay. WWE WrestleMania XXI is, like Raw 1 and 2, a game with pretty graphics, but terrible game play and too many glitches to count.

I wouldn't even recommend renting it, and I certainly do not advise wasting your hard-earned money on it. Wait for next year. Maybe then they'll put some effort into it.

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 05/01/05