RetroMania Wrestling [Xbox]
A spiritual successor to games such as WWF WrestleFest, Retrosoft’s RetroMania Wrestling is - as the name would suggest - a retro-styled wrestling game. The main story sees you take on the role of Johnny Retro, who is returning to wrestling after a serious injury, re-learning the ropes and preparing to make his comeback. It’s a pre-set story, with a defined character (no character creation mode here) and limited dialogue options to take the story in slightly different directions in terms of rivalries.
Strangely, losing battles in Story mode reverts to a Game Over screen where you’ll have to retry to continue, unlike typical story based wrestling games in which this leads to you dropping down in ranking. Because of this, it feels like you end up reverting to a lot of button mashing at times, in order to progress. It also seems to avoid telling you a lot of crucial info, such as how to climb up the turnbuckles, or pick up chairs to hit your opponents.
Other game modes are available, including 10 Pounds of Gold, which has you work your way through the roster to take on the champion; Retro Rumble, which is a Royal Rumble styled mode with 16 wrestlers entering the ring, one by one, with the aim to be the last man standing; and Versus, which consists of different match options: Singles, 3-Way, 4-Way, Tag Team, 6-Man Tag, and 8-Man Tag. Retro Rumble is the most challenging of the modes, with things getting pretty hectic in the ring the more wrestlers enter - thankfully there’s an option to put a brightly coloured ring around your feet, highlighting yourself so you don’t get lost in the crowd.
The controls feel quite basic, with many matches ending up with you resorting to button-mashing. You’ve got Light, Medium and Heavy attacks, with more momentum needed to successfully pull off stronger attacks. Your momentum builds up with each successful move, and using taunts as well as winning grapples will increase momentum further. Maxing out the momentum bar will allow you to unleash finishers - unfortunately though, as mentioned previously, the game doesn’t do a very good job at explaining much in the way of the controls, with the tutorial instead just giving you a very basic overview of things; but missing out important things such as reversals and finishers, leaving you to figure out those for yourself. Again, being able to create custom wrestlers and choose their moves would have been a great inclusion, as this is one of the integral parts to getting the full enjoyment out of wrestling games, especially when you get to use your custom characters in battle against friends.
Done in a cartoony style, with lightly animated segments to progress the story in between matches. Some of the characters available are easily recognisable to wrestling fans, from groups such as the Road Warriors and Blue World Order, to individual wrestlers like Colt Cabana and Tommy Dreamer. Sadly, the roster is severely lacking, with only 16 characters available to play; if they had added a wider variety of fictional wrestlers, as well as giving the ability to build custom wrestlers, this would have bulked things out and given players more choice. The characters, as well as audience members, are well designed - with some familiar faces in the crowds - in particular, the Convention setting has a Limited Run Games stand, as well as Jay and Silent Bob promoting Mall Brawl. Sound design is a little hit or miss, with some of the voice lines feeling pretty awkward and out of place. The soundtrack, by Danimal Cannon, is very punchy and arcade-like, with a decent variety of tracks to keep things from feeling too repetitive.
Available for £24.99 on the Xbox Store, it feels somewhat expensive for what it provides currently - but with talk of extra characters to be added as free DLC, as well as the potential for custom fighters at some point further down the line, we’ve got high hopes to have reason to come back for more. Overall, we enjoyed our time with RetroMania Wrestling, and can’t wait to see what else gets added later on.
In the end, we decided to give RetroMania Wrestling the Collecting Asylum rating of 7/10.
Have you played RetroMania Wrestling yet? What did you think of it?
Let us know in the comments below!
- V x
Thank you to Retrosoft for the RetroMania Wrestling Xbox review code!
