WWF Road to Wrestlemania

"Plenty of Shame in this Lame Game"

Does THQ have it in for Nintendo-playing WWF fans, or what? First, the promised Game Boy Color version of last year's ''WWF: No Mercy'' was a No Show, as were several non-essential but would've-been-cool features of the N64 game (the Title History and Win/Loss Records screens, for instance, not to mention the much-touted Transfer Pak crossover with the non-existent GBC game). Then came the bizarre and unnecessary ''WWF: Betrayal''... I think folks tolerated this stinker because we had our stubby little button-mashing fingers crossed, figuring that the WWF's Debut Title for the incredible Game Boy Advance must kick butt. All this slacking-off on THQ's part must mean they're totally concentrating on this certain masterpiece, right? Especially in light of the competition, the world-rocking ''Fire Pro Wrestling''... right?
Ugh. Talk about waiting in vain. Since this is, at best, one-tenth the game that FPW is, how dare they charge more than $3.50 for it? At the very least, ''WWF: Road to WrestleMania'' should carry a Game Boy Color price tag, since it's little more than a spruced-up GBC title.
Graphics- Hey, the crowd looks great. Don't laugh! Stands full of us rowdy, freakish marks, waving obscene signs and throwing beer cups, are an essential part of the visual of Pro Rasslin', and this area has generally been overlooked in video games. Other than that, I'm sorry to say, the visuals... well, they suck. Lemme put it to ya like this: Tazz is the same height as Kane. Rikishi Phatu has the same build as Jeff Hardy. I mean... c'mon. Throw in stiff, choppy animation to go with the unlikely generic characters and you've got a situation that would have been intolerable on the old Game Boy. Menu screens look good, but there must have been more they could have done with the Entrance Videos... the Game Boy Color could run short video clips; surely some bits of the real videos could have been used (it's not like they didn't have plenty of memory left over).
Sound- Again, a mixed bag, but mostly not so fantastic. Some sound effects and even voice clips are clear and sound good. But the music... oh my sweet Lord in Heaven, the music. Awful, awful, awful. Some (most) of the Entrance Themes are unrecognizable, and the Main Theme music is this horrible, tinny little ditty straight out of the dark ages of the original black & white Game Boy, circa 1990. Offensive.
Gameplay- I got five words for ya: NO CREATE-A-WRESTLER FEATURE. At all. In other words, if you don't wanna play as one of these 24 jabronis (that's right, fans, 24 to ''Fire Pro Wrestling'''s two hundred, with no more to be unlocked or nuthin'), well, you're outta luck. What, you don't want to play as Mr. Ass? Isn't leaving the C-A-W feature out of a wrestling game sort of like leaving hidden rooms and levels out of a Mario/Zelda-style adventure, or putting out a racing game where you just cruise around the same oval, over and over again? As for the actual game, it's nothing special, nothing you haven't seen before on Game Boy... face the other guy (and it's all guys, no Lita, no Stephanie, no Trish), get a grapple on him, and devastate him with your very-limited repertoire of half-assed moves (and no, you don't get to see any character's Moves List), finishing with your badly-animated Signature Move. If you can figure out how to use it, that is, given the game's odd Biorhythm/Adrenaline system (an unwanted leftover from GBC's ''WrestleMania 2000''). Gimme a nice Health Meter that just fills up, willya? At any rate, with no means of editing the boys or coming up with ones of your own, this routine gets stale. Blah.
Replay Value- Virtually none (see ''No Create-a-Wrestler Feature'', above). With no secrets, no unlockables, no easter-eggs at all (not even backstage areas like in the otherwise-crappy ''WCW: Mayhem'' for GBC), combined with the lame gameplay, there's no real reason to play this game at all in the first place, let alone again. The Create-a-Pay-per-View feature is new to handheld wrestling games, but too bad the rest of the game around it sucks.
In short, this would be an amazingly pathetic display even if ''Fire Pro Wrestling'' hadn't already shown off what a rasslin' game can be on the Game Boy Advance. Fans looking for a decent follow-up to ''FPW'' are gonna hafta wait for ''Final Fire Pro Wrestling'' or maybe pray that Acclaim does a GBA version of ''Legends of Wrestling''. I give ''WWF: Road to Wrestlemania'' a ''2'' in the same way a schoolteacher gives even the dumbest student two points for showing up and writing his name.
Fans, spare yourselves some grief and pass on this mess. How did this game even get released? WHAT?!

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 11/24/01, Updated 11/24/01