Wrestlemania 21

Reviewed by John Burrell Jr.
September 2005

Developer: Studio Gigante Publisher: THQ Website: www.wrestlemania21thegame.com Platform(s): XBOX Players: 1-4 (XBOX Live Enabled) ESRB Rating: T (Teen) Review Rating: 7 out of 10

I have been a faithful viewer of wrestling in all of its forms since 1987. I consider myself an extremely avid fan of Sports Entertainment. The exhilaration of watching your favorite wrestler dive off the top rope, or land their signature finishing move is a feeling like no other. That feeling was what I was hoping for when I popped Wrestlemania 21 in to my X-Box. I was very disappointed when I did not see those results..

When the game was first announced, the X-Box had already produced two of the worse wrestling titles ever. They both had great ideas put into the game such as a season mode with a rivalry system. However, the clunky controls and glitch filled animations made the game unbearable to play. This trend of wrestling games was about to change and the X-Box was supposed to finally get their great wrestling title with Wrestlemania 21. Instead, the clunky controls returned slightly tweaked for a less frustrating experience. Unfortunately the game was still no where near the fluidity of the Smackdown franchise. The new button scheme that was instituted had me making the wrong moves if I held the button a smidge too long. This made matches harder than necessary.

The artificial intelligence was one of its few strong points. If set on the highest difficulty setting it became an actual challenge to win a match. The CPU wrestler would counter just about every move I had executed. This was especially prevalent when facing the bottom rung of wrestlers in the game. Some of my matches tallied five plus minutes against some of the worst people in the sports entertainment business.

The one feature I looked forward too the most was the X-box Live portion of this product. It was to be the best part of it. Four player games with all the matches in offline mode were to be made accessible online. That was big news when the title was compared to Smackdown vs Raw, which only allowed one on one singles or bra and panties matches. The disappointment came on release day where the online capability was not functional in the game. When they finally released a patch to repair this problem, many gamers had either traded in their copies of the game or returned them to retailers.

They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions; well there was plenty of good intentions here and also a lot of videogame purgatory. These facts convinced me to give this game a low Evo Factor as there are better games to turn your attention to. As a wrestling fan, I hope they can get it right the next time out. On the other hand, as a videogame aficionado I wouldn't mind if they (in the immortal words of the great Undertaker) let this game, “Rest in peace.”

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