OHHH HEY OHHH! OHHH HEY HO! So anyway, i wanted to give myself an early christmas treat and i raided the local thrift store of its comic books and miscellaneous magazines and trading cards. The gaming section was full of football games and COD, but in the middle of all that soulless yearly slop i found a copy of WWE '12, MY kind of yearly slop! This was the first wrestling game i bought when i started watching again, lots of nostalgia with this one, but ever since i played so much more stuff, will it hold back when compared to my very fuzzy memories?
Most recent WWE game i played was 2K19, which was also a long ass time ago, i do remember WWE games from PS3/360 onwards having a lot of content, but i was absolutely not ready for all the customization options i had at my disposal. Properly overwhelmed. The character editor is something else, not only you can create your own looks and moveset, you can also stitch together your own entrance, create your own finisher and even put together an approximation of a titantron. Custom taunts are missing from the older games, but other than that you have so many options you won't even know what to do with lots of them. Arena creation is nothing special, but it's neat that it's there.
Massive roster as you'd expect, tons of game modes as you'd expect, predatory DLC as you'd expect. Not gonna go through every little nook and cranny since this review will already be long as is.
I have fond memories about Road To Wrestlemania from when i first played this game, and the storylines themselves are still entertaining for what they are, but this kind of mode doesn't hold a candle to either the Season mode from past games or MyRise from those that came after. It's just a bunch of matches with no branching paths or managerial aspects, and you can't even play the individual storylines in the order you prefer. Meh.
On the other hand, Universe is every bit as good as i've seen people say. I watched the white bois at Newlegacyinc go through it some time ago and i was concerned this would have ruined the experience for myself after seeing possibly all of the scenarios this mode had to offer, but to my surprise i still found a ton of new stuff as i was trying to carry my edgy OC to the top of the food chain.
Like i said in my review for Dissidia Duodecim, i'm not too big into using story/quest editors for myself, but after trying the one this game has to offer and after playing a couple of the template storylines they used to showcase it, i find it beyond criminal that this feature has been dropped in future releases. It's impressively detailed as is, and if modern 2K games had it, with all the proper quality of life and extra features it should have, i probably wouldn't have given up on the series. Not because i'd use it myself, but because having an accessible way to experience hand first the e-feds of edgy teenagers and autistic adults alike would increase my lifespan by a few years. If i could access stories in this game without needing a subscription to Xbox Live this rating would be at least a whole star higher.
The biggest issue with WWE '12 really is that the wrestling itself is SO ass. In the back of the box it says they updated the gameplay to be snappier and more fast paced compared to last year's release, if there's any truth to that then good lord i don't even want to imagine what Smackdown vs Raw 11 was like. Don't get me wrong, in terms of how much control you have over your own actions this aspect of the game is just as packed with content as anything else, and you do have a decent amount of universal customization for many of the Corre mechanics, but none of that does anything to improve the fun factor. I don't care if this is just a matter of me wanting every wrestling game to play like HCTP, i'd happily shave off most of the simulative minutiae Yukes definitely worked oh so hard to implement in the gameplay, if it resulted in all of the wrestlers moving a lil bit faster and all of the moves having a lil more weight to them. And the QTEs, oh my Lord, they're EVERYWHERE. QTEs for kicking out of a pin, for escaping a submission, for attempting submission, for throwing someone off the top rope, for resisting getting thrown off the top rope, for snapping out of confusion, for making a comeback, for getting out of a collar-and-elbow, for doing reversals, it's ENDLESS. The reversals in particular are the fucking worst. In theory the short window of time in which you can pull them off should make the game more skill based, in practice my index finger is begging me for mercy because reversals and counter reversals and counter counter reversals are all you fucking do in this game. Specifically, getting your finisher meter stolen after someone reverses you is so beyond lame because you pretty much can't do anything about it and building up meter without taunt spamming takes a million years.
Just watch the CPU wrestlers beat each others up in Universe. That should be fun.
