"Wrestlemania 21 worth your money?"

So there I was on the night of the ECW One Night Stand PPV, filing into the theatre when they gave out raffle tickets for prizes before the show started. I had my eye on the snazzy-looking ECW jersey, but it was snatched up before my ticket was drawn. I wound up with a copy of WM21, and I sighed. I had heard all the horrific reviews this game has garnered, but I thought to myself, "Hey, at least it's free."

Now that I've thoroughly played it, you couldn't pay me to play it again.

GRAPHICS (9/10)

Perhaps the only redeeming quality of WM21 is the pretty pretty eye candy. Unlike Day of Reckoning, the faces of the character models look spot-on. The crowd, like the last year's games, are blocky yet 3D, though fuzzy and uninspired, but that's just me being nitpicky. Gigante really went out of their way to faithfully recreate every single PPV venue from Backlash '04 (which I attended, BTW) to Wrestlemania 21. Flashy-pretty and all, but that's about it for the good news.

GAMEPLAY (5/10)

Ah snap. This is where it all falls apart. Strikes are X, grapples are A, running is Y, and submission grapples are B. A good idea in theory, if only the controls weren't so unresponsive. I'll get to that later. Did you know that Rhyno's finisher is a Black Hole Slam? Or that Eddie Gurrero's finisher is a Reverse Gorry Special Stretch? Well I sure didn't, but that's what they are in the game. Why? Because for some strange reason, you just can't so running finishers (Rhyno's Gore) or aerial finishers (Eddie's Frogspash). I scoured the manual for hours and found nothing on how to go them. I pressed every single button combo imaginable to try and pull them off. A+B+Y? Nope. A+B+X? Nein. A+B+X+Y? Nix. A+B+Y+Control stick? Nay. A+B+X+Y+Control stick? Nosiree-bob. It just doesn't work.

Another thing that peeved me was that the lack of high-risk aerial spots. SSPs to the outside? No, all you get are double axehandles, the likes of which would make even Kevin Nash jealous. Plancha vaults? Nope, all you get are running tope dives, the likes of which you'd expect from, oh say, Mike Awesome on his worst day. Slingshot attacks from the apron to the inside? Nope. Apron-to-outside attacks like Asai Moonsaults? Nope. Well, there goes your Crusierweight match, bub.

Ladder matches are a different bag of beans entirely. Remember when Michaels and Ramon had their legendary clash at Wrestlemania X, when Shawn was reaching for the belt and Razor came and shoulderblocked the ladder, spilling HBK down? In ladder matches, you don't reach and hope to grab the belt, you just grab it. And you dangle, dangle, dangle free from harm until you eventually drop and win the match. Anti-climatic, no?

Overall, gameplay feels like the legendary No Mercy engine, only hacked to bits with a machete, and more glitches than you can shake a stick at!

CONTROLS (6/10)

Sometimes they work spot-on, other times they're so unresponsive you wonder if you're better off playing with a brick instead of a controller.

CREATE A WRESTLER (3/10)

CAW has always been the backbone of wrestling games. I thought, "Okay, the gameplay sucks, the controls are garbage, at least there's still CAW. You'd have to be a certifiable nutcase to bomb on the CAW mode." Alas, I wept when I discovered the horrors within. Finishing moves? Not until you progress through a horrific story mode first. And the ones you're left with at the start make Abdullah the Butcher's moveset look like Ric Flair's extensive offense repertoire. Editing wrestlers on the official roster is also a no-go, which no doubt comes as a huge disappointment for many longtime wrestling gamers, me in particular.

STORY MODE (5/10)

You play as your CAW as a rookie on Velocity, eventually being called up to Smackdown. The voice acting and character motions are precise and true to form, but the cutscenes are where the fun all ends. After failing to beat RENE DUPREE on EASY three times in a row with a gameplay engine that would make the devil himself weep for mercy, any and/or all fun that you could ever have is sapped away almost immediately.

SOUND- (5/10)

Well, at least the sound's clear. That's all the positives there.

CREATE A TITLE - (1/10)

This mode is awesome because a title is easy to make and you can defend it online or in an exhibition match

ONLINE PLAY - (1/10)

Online play? What online play? If you're one of the many many unfortunate people to get the buggy copies, you're offline unless you can get another disc. And even then, with all the lag in an already painfully slow and tedious engine, even if you can get into a THQ server, you may as well not even bother.

OVERALL: (4/10)

Pretty graphics and pretty cutscenes are all the redeeming qualities this game has. A long time ago, I thought that Wrestlemania x8 was the worst wrestling game ever. I really didn't need to be proved wrong.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 08/15/05