WWF Wrestlemania 2000 (Game Boy Color)

...i'm guessing that this means WWF Road To Wrestlemania, so that's what i'm going to review. To put it bluntly, this is by no means a terrible game, but it is simply inferior to Fire Pro Wrestling in every way.

From the main menu screen, you get 8 Single play options:

Season - The Main 1 Player game. Basically you choose a wrestler and fight sequential matches with differing opponents until you win the WWF title. Pretty ...
...good boredom reliever. But this can't hide the fact that the GBA already has a great wrestling game in Fire Pro. If you're looking for an official, WWF Licensed game on your GBA, get this. However, if you're perfectly happy with Fire Pro Wrestling, just don't bother.  ... more

Well, i'm guessing that this means WWF Road To Wrestlemania, so that's what i'm going to review. To put it bluntly, this is by no means a terrible game, but it is simply inferior to Fire Pro Wrestling in every way.

From the main menu screen, you get 8 Single play options:

Season - The Main 1 Player game. Basically you choose a wrestler and fight sequential matches with differing opponents until you win the WWF title. Pretty fun, but lacks the storylines and inventiveness of many other career modes.

Gauntlet - Again, you fight sequential matches in a row, this time seeing how long you can go without losing. Not much fun

Exhibition - Standard fare, one match. Good for a quick fix or if you're really really bored. Surprisingly, there's a whole host of match options, like Tag, Handicap, Hardcore and even a (pretty lame) steel cage match!

King of The Ring - just like the PPV tournament, you pick 16 wrestlers and they fight it out in heats until there is one winner left.

Ironman Match - most falls in a timelimit wins. Dunno why they didn't put this under "exhibition" really.

Royal Rumble - 30 men enter the ring one by one until there is one left. Total chaos and a whole lot of fun as well.

Pay Per View - Basically you assemble up to 8 matches and play them all one after another. A little bit pointless but a nice novelty for recreating your favourite PPVs, although you'd be hard pressed to do so with the limited amount of characters available.

So, a surprising amount of modes for THQ's first GBA wrestling game. Unfortunately the same can't be said about selectable characters - there are only 24, with some noticeable exceptions - Big Show, anyone? Why they put in Billy Gunn is beyond me. But when Fire Pro can manage to fit in 200+ wrestlers AND have better graphics than WWFR2W, there doesn't seem to be much of an excuse for this lack of characters. My only guess is that they limited the characters to fit in little extras like the (pretty bad) entrances, which i could have done without. Most fans will be happy that all the obvious wrestlers like Rock, Austin, Undertaker etc are in here, and all have their characteristic finishers. Some even have trademark moves elsewhere in their moveset, but if you can manage to pull these moves off, you're a better man than I.

This is because the control scheme is very average, and it seems like they tried to copy Fire Pro but failed. It sort of revolves around grappling and timing, but doesn't, and inevitably the controls get very frustrating - a lot of the time you press buttons and nothing happens, resulting in either you and your opponent unspectacularly breaking up their grapple or your opponent simply killing you. Each wrestler has an energy bar consisting of three stacks of three bars - not that i know what any of these stacks mean. I know that you can do your Finisher when the far right one is filled up, but apart from that they just seem to be there as a distraction - i've lost matches where all 3 of my bars have been full, and i've won matches where all of them have been empty. Go figure. To put it simply, Fire Pro's engine is just better. Still, this game seems to more aimed at people looking for a quick wrestling fix, and in this sense i suppose the pretty shallow gameplay succeeds.

The game is hindered by a lot of other things - The graphics aren't detailed at all and very, very cartoonish. Again, Fire Pro manages to pull off similair graphics but make them look much, much more realistic, so why can't this game? A lack of unlockables is also a shame - even Fire Pro had a flood of hidden wrestlers to unlock. The game is pretty out of date in a lot of ways: there are no 'new' characters, and the closest you're gonna get to ECW or WCW is Raven & Tazz (who is still in his singlet, an outfit he stopped wearing like a year and a half ago) being selectable characters. Also, the lack of a Create-a-Wrestler mode is a real shame. But then again, with the blurry and un-detailed graphics, any CAW mode would have been inherently flawed.

This all sounds very negative doesn't it? To tell the truth this game isn't *that* bad, and is a actually a pretty good boredom reliever. But this can't hide the fact that the GBA already has a great wrestling game in Fire Pro. If you're looking for an official, WWF Licensed game on your GBA, get this. However, if you're perfectly happy with Fire Pro Wrestling, just don't bother. 

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