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The post VGCC Episode 310: Bagged Milk Whales appeared first on Gamesline.

WWE 2K18’s gameplay feels almost exactly the same as it did in WWE 2K17, if not worse. The biggest new feature is an impenetrable carrying system that allows you to lift your opponents and bring them somewhere else for a short time. It’s entirely useless in a competitive match, looks terrible, accomplishes very little, and requires you to learn an entirely new set of awkward button combinations to pull off. It’s hard to understand why time and effort went into this system when these games have had so many other glaring problems. The new additions to the gameplay this year aren’t all bad, thankfully, as there are a larger variety of moves that combo into each other. As mentioned in the WWE 2K17 review, the few combo moves in that game added a lot to the gameplay, and it’s good to see them continuing that trend. In addition, a practice play feature was added to the move-set editor, which is really handy if you just wanna get in and test some things out without having to load into a match.

However, some of the idiosyncrasies of the franchise that made for smoother gameplay are just gone. One shining example was the ability to perform running signature and finisher moves to opponents who were still getting to their feet. When you attempt it now, the game simply doesn’t allow you to perform the move until the opponent is to their feet, which just results in you bumping into them awkwardly. Instead of facing the opponent while walking around, your character instead looks off into whatever weird direction they’re moving in, often leaving you out of position or unable to do moves. Interruptible taunts were removed as well, which makes you wait through an entire wake up taunt animation before you can perform your move. It makes zero sense why these tiny features were removed or changed, and it’s ultimately heartbreaking for a series that needs more mechanics like this if it wants to be seen as a fun game by a larger audience.

For the most part, this is one of the best looking WWE games to date. It’s clear that a lot of love went into rendering 3D models of the roster, and the updated lighting engine accentuates the entrance animations extremely well. The entrances, while some were clearly given more attention than others, are the best looking they’ve ever been. Even the custom characters manage to look more detailed and lifelike than many other big titles on the market. The level of detail in the textures and entrance animations are genuinely impressive, but that level of quality ends the second you start handling the game. The gameplay animations are just as janky as ever. While some of the moves may look cool, walking around with a blank expression and throwing punches into the air is very awkward. I don’t know if these games will ever get to a point where the action looks, or at the very least feels good.

There’s one aspect of the game’s aesthetics that are more dreadful than anything else. Somewhere along the way of WWE 2K18’s development, the unfortunate decision to include sweat was made. During the course of a match, each wrestler becomes completely drenched in an unrealistic amount of sweat. Maybe if it was toned down a little bit, it’d be easier to stomach, but it looks like two goopy sloppy messes rolling around with each other, and it feels incredibly dirty whenever it happens. It not only looks horrible, it’s also unavoidable. I went to far lengths to find some way to fix this. As far as I know, it doesn’t happen to created characters, so I could ostensibly recreate the entire roster as created wrestlers, but that would waste valuable create-a-wrestler slots that I need for the Ninja Turtles. If you can tolerate watching wet seals flop around on each other, then you might be fine.

The new MyPlayer wrapper acts as the main mode of the game, and contains two returning game types: the single player MyCareer campaign and the online matchmaking Road To Glory mode, renamed and revamped from it’s 2K Tonight predecessor. Players use the character creator to make their own custom wrestler who is used between both modes. It’s important to note that you can’t import an already made character, or export your character out of MyPlayer once you’ve finished the campaign. The handful of the items you use to make your character are locked behind largely inexpensive in-game currency, while the majority are locked behind randomized loot boxes.

The part where this gets egregious is in the move-set creation, where you’re given an insultingly paltry selection of moves to choose from, while the other 99% are locked behind loot box drops. Not to mention, the currency you need to buy the incredibly expensive loot boxes is also necessary for stat progression. If this game had the option to pay for virtual currency with real money, this would be one of the worst examples of predatory microtransactions to date. It feels like a system built that way, but the part where you actually pay for the loot boxes was pulled last second due to the fan outcry against them. It also sets a terrible precedent for future WWE games: with a system already in place for microtransactions, all they need to do is pull the trigger. That’s incredibly scary for a series that has largely courted a teenage demographic, and hopefully they have the sense to pull away in future iterations of MyPlayer.

While Road to Glory seems like a totally serviceable online competitive mode, the revamped MyCareer appears to be the real draw of this year’s game. Instead of being a menu driven affair, you’re now put in the shoes of your created wrestler in a third person, over the shoulder campaign. I have extremely mixed feelings on this mode. It’s another bland, repeatable single player mode with tiny elements of an actual story that either went nowhere or actively stopped happening the second repetition finally kicked in after the tutorial. The thing that makes it worse is instead of navigating menus to select matches, you have to walk from the parking lot to the production area to view a match board while maybe walking around and talking to some other people to pick up tedious side quests. The MyPlayer Invasion from previous years which allowed you to play alongside created wrestlers from your friends list doesn’t result in anything fun or interesting happening this time around. Instead, you only seen a couple of friends pop up backstage very occasionally, and interactions are limited to them telling me I’m doing a good job and not much else. It feels like a real waste of a good idea.

On the other hand, there’s a sobering feeling that comes from seeing some of my favorite wrestlers completely in ring gear doing mundane things. Johnny Gargano trying to pick what he wants to eat at catering. Ember Moon looking at her phone standing glassy eyed, presumably just killing time before her match. There was even a time where Akam, one half of the Authors of Pain, dressed to the nines in a full Army of Two cosplay, told me how much he loved free catering, and that even though the food isn’t good for him, he still loves being able to save a few bucks. A game in which I have the option to be nice to Eric Young, because he seems like such a sweet dude, isn’t something I knew I needed in my life. I love this. If MyCareer was nothing but endearingly day-to-day conversations with larger than life personalities, it would be one of the best things to exist in gaming. The novelty of this wears off quickly, as lines begin to repeat and more wrestlers default to talking about how much they loved or hated my match, or are uncharacteristically aggressive for no real reason whatsoever. I hope for future iterations, 2K learns some lessons about the best parts of this mode.

Universe mode, the WWE game’s equivalent of a franchise mode, comes with a couple new features that add a tiny bit more depth to experience compared to previous incarnations. The biggest addition are power rankings, a full ranked list of every wrestler, along with personal goals that help them get higher on the list. Wrestlers that make it higher up on the list gain extra stat bonuses. Rivalries, the primary way of developing stories between superstars, have also been given a bigger spotlight. On top of selecting or letting the game generate monthly rivalries, potential rivalries will surface as a result of matches or promos that happen outside of the active rivalries. These also result in a variety of cutscenes popping up out of nowhere, which adds some unpredictability to Universe mode as a whole. It’s a neat touch, but the rivalry system still ends up feeling very lacking.

First of all, you can only have three active rivalries happening at a time per show, which will usually be used on championship feuds more than anything else. That’s not even mentioning how there can be up to four active championships on a show, and only three rivalries, meaning one title will always be left out of storylines every month. Also, you can only have one on one or two on two rivalries. That means if there are factions like The New Day with more than two people in a group, only two of them will come out for storyline matches instead of the whole team. This also excludes the possibility of multi-man rivalries that would result in Triple Threat or Fatal 4 Way matches at PPV events. Finally, the matches the rivalries lead to rarely involve any interesting match types or stipulations, so it’s typically just a standard one on one match to cap off a three month long feud. While you can still personally accomplish this through micromanagement, the rivalry system exists so you shouldn’t need to. Universe mode has suffered from this lack of variety for years now, and it’s rough seeing its most important system make a tiny handful of positive changes at a glacial yearly pace, and not coming anywhere close to where it needs to be in order to be an engaging system.

Overall, WWE 2K18 is another disappointment in a long line of disappointments. I ended my review last year with a glimmer of hope that future WWE games would lead to more positive changes. I don’t have that same spark this year. A mess of half-baked ideas and pointless additions don’t leave me as positive about the future of this series. The sad part is that these games aren’t incentivized to hit beyond their demographic. They make a ton of cash churning these out yearly, and meaningful changes would cost too much money, manpower, and time that they don’t have for their yearly release schedule. I’ve grown up playing these games my whole life and I want them to be good very badly. It’s partially my own fault for continuing to support these games despite all their misgivings. All I can really say is… just go play Fire Pro World.

The post WWE 2K18 Review (PS4) appeared first on Gamesline.

For as long as anyone can remember, these games have always felt like clunky messes that actively work against any cool thing that you want to do in the ring. This one isn’t an exception, but compared to the last few years, it does feel a lot snappier. While you’ll still find yourself squatting like a chicken waiting for your opponent to finish their groggy animation before you can do a move on the ground, the wait is much much shorter. There are also more moves that combo into each other, which are pretty smooth when you get the opportunity to use them. Another neat new addition are contextual taunts, which’ll do a different animation depending on where you are in the ring, like telling your opponent to suck it while leaning up against the ropes. You can already tell your opponent to suck it without leaning on something, but it’s nice to have options.

If you’re familiar at all with how this series handles, then you won’t have much trouble getting into this one, for better or worse. While there are nice additions, there aren’t very many positive changes, especially for a series long in need of a major structural overhaul. The controls are still antiquated, requiring strange button combinations to do common things like run or leave the ring. Prompts don’t appear when they should for no good reason. It still feels like a PS2 game in the year 2016, and that’s just plain unacceptable.

WWE 2k17 primarily features two returning singleplayer game modes, MyCareer and Universe. Absent, however, is the historical Showcase mode that would put players in the shoes of past wrestlers to reenact big moments in wrestling history. I was never a huge fan of this mode, but I know its exclusion is a huge turn-off for a lot of people. Seeing CM Punk banter during his matches with John Cena, or watching The Rock steal the camera to talk smack into it with his back to Stone Cold Steve Austin is enough to give people the warm fuzzy feeling that nostalgia brings. There’s none of that in this game.

With the removal of Showcase, it seemed like MyCareer was poised to become the new story-driven single player mode this year. There are a few scant some bits of story that are few and far between in what’s largely just a repeatable single player mode. You start with a short tutorial that somehow feels 20 minutes longer than it should be. After a couple weeks of training (set to what feels like a hellish, endless loop of Axwell /\ Ingrosso’s This Time), you’re ready to become a full time wrestler. It is undoubtedly way more fun to screw around and watch your dude stumble in promo practice, awkwardly gesturing around and tapping his mic until your trainer says, “Kid, you’re a natural!” However, for the sake of your own time and sanity, it’s probably a better idea not to mess around and complete the tutorial as best and quickly as you can since messing around puts you in an NXT chapter with no story bits at all. You have to grind your way through that nonsense before you get to the main roster, where stuff allegedly happens.

I put 15 hours into MyCareer and saw a total of two story cutscenes: one where Triple H pats you on the back and says you’re doing a good job, and another where Paul Heyman does the exact same thing. The UI gave me a little bit of indication of what I need to do in order to progress to more story bits, but that involved grinding through another 5 or so hours of absolute slog matches against really poor looking created characters. Although, you can probably skip past most of this grinding if you just pay $10 for the MyPlayer kickstart, which, surprise, doesn’t come with the $30 season pass.

Universe mode is similarly devoid of any major changes, which is a huge drag. They made a point of advertising that with the exclusion of Showcase mode, Universe and MyCareer were going to get a lot more attention. Instead, it’s the same bland fantasy booking mode it’s been for years. You still only get 3 rivalries a show, which is the main way you actually set up some kind of storyline between wrestlers. The stories that unfold aren’t exactly groundbreaking. Someone will walk to the entrance, point at a dude in the ring, and gesture that he wants his title. Sometimes a dude will attack another dude. It feels really shallow and meaningless.

Actually playing Universe mode does little for me too. You can’t play as your tag partner in tag matches, which is not only incredibly boring and annoying, but was also something they allowed you to do in earlier games. It’s my least favorite thing about MyCareer mode, and hopefully it’s an oversight that’ll get patched later. Setting two people in a rivalry occasionally means they just wrestle each other and nobody else for a month or longer, which makes an already repetitive mode even moreso. The only thing that gives me the slightest bit of lizard brain enjoyment is assigning people to brands and tag teams and matches together, looking at match cards, and saying “I did that!”

They did at least overhaul the interface of Universe to make it look similar to MyCareer, which was a pet peeve of mine as a designer. All the interfaces for separate modes in earlier games were a weird hodgepodge that lacked any cohesion. They felt like, and most likely were, developed by individual teams. However, the overhaul of Universe mode’s UI makes it less usable than it was in earlier years. You can still find out the rankings of every superstar on every brand, but it involves a few more button clicks and more scrolling through menus that lack any kind of meaningful sorting options. It’s a huge pain and a baffling change that makes playing an already unfun mode less fun to play.

Mycareer and Universe mode both tout a brand new feature where wrestlers can finally go toe to toe in a war of words with the Promo Engine, which is very barebones and pointless to engage with. You get a list of 4 unvoiced text options to choose from that are all terrible, and have a range of exactly two things: “I love/hate the Authority,” or “I’m the best superstar in WWE!” The things you say in promos don’t fit together in any meaningful way. You’re just picking from a table of canned responses, and some of them are arbitrarily the right one. Occasionally, in dueling promos, you’ll have an option that directly responds to something your opponent said. Somehow, those moments are few and far between, and not the entire point of dueling promos.

This is such a bummer since promos are a massive part of wrestling. The system in this game feels like an alpha build of what a promo engine could be someday down the line. I can see a world where wrestling promos in wrestling games totally work, too. Something like custom voiced fantasy promos where Shinsuke Nakamura smack talks Bret Hart would be extremely good, and what they have now is hollow and meaningless. The most fun to be had from promos is this one skill you get get where you choose to end a promo whenever you want, low blow your opponent, and then the game bluescreens and crashes to the dashboard.

There are a startling amount of bugs in this game. These games have always been janky, buggy messes, but typically never straight up unplayable at launch. At one point, after booting my PS4 from rest mode, my Universe mode save was totally gone. Fortunately, I was able to grab a back-up off my cloud saves. Another time I went and selected Create a New Superstar and the game just up and crashed. Probably the weirdest glitch I found was during the middle of a No Holds Barred match against a Goku I downloaded off community creations. I tried to bring him with me to this game’s brand new backstage area, but he decided he didn’t want to follow me. I went back and forth between the backstage and ringside areas, but he wasn’t there. I hit the start button, and his portrait just vanished. He quit WWE 2k17, and I can’t blame Goku for that.

My experience with the online mode of this game was just fine. I played the 2k Tonight mode which just seems to have 3 theme matches you can play for bonus points or money. I’m not actually sure and it doesn’t really matter. I matched up with some randos, and while there’s definitely noticeable latency issues, I was still able to hit moves and counter things fairly regularly. It’s not like this game requires twitch responses or anything, and if you’re actively trying to play this game competitively, I question a lot of choices that you’ve made, and I’ve played these games for over a decade.

If you’re a fan of wrestling games, I have a lot of empathy for you. There hasn’t been a good mainstream wrestling game in a long time. We’ll probably be waiting a while for a wrestling game where everything just works. I did have a moment during this game, though, that came close. After I leveled up my created character’s most important usability stats like reversals and movement speed up to max, I put him in a match with a similarly high leveled Finn Balor. It was absolutely perfect. Our reversals played off each other well, we both got in our best offense, and everything felt responsive and right. Perhaps setting my stats like that helped alleviate a lot of the clunkiness. Maybe it was total happenstance that everything worked exactly how it was supposed to. I don’t know. What I do know is that it gave me the slightest glimmer of hope. That this year’s game isn’t the best but that maybe not next year, maybe not the year after that, maybe not two years from now, but someday, they’re gonna totally nail it. Maybe not today, but someday.

The post WWE 2k17 (PS4) Review appeared first on Gamesline.