WWE Legends Of WrestleMania Review

Bit late with the review but i think this game deserves a good review from a wrestling fans point of view and from a casual gamer’s point of view.

As a WWE fan, I buy the annual game from WWE, which generally, year after year has been improving. Then WWE release WWE Legends Of WrestleMania, apparently for the 'older' generation of gamers who will remember WrestleMania’s from the past 25 years. This game boasts a simpler control system along with a good selection of legends and authentic arenas that create an excellent sense of nostalgia.

The first thing any wrestling game fan will notice is the very simplistic control system. It's in an arcade style and makes use of only the four face buttons; these are for strike, grapple, block and action. At some points in the game this is actually more complicated than it sounds. Since there are only four buttons, each one does different things in different environments, and this can get very confusing at times. Obviously this game is trying to target the casual gamer market that may be intimidated by the complex control system of the Smackdown Vs Raw games.

With the tag-line 'relive, rewrite and redfine' that is exactly what you can do in ‘WrestleMania Tour Mode’ with previous WrestleMania matches... kind of. It's very limited. With the relive mode you gain points in matches by completing events that actually happened in the matches. With rewrite you have to change the outcomes of the matches and with redefine you compete in the matches but with different stipulations. This is a lot of fun for matches that you have watched.

The game also has a 'Legend Killer Mode’ where you can use any superstar or created superstar to attempt to beat a selection of legends, one after the other, all in one go. The last tier being the hardest and most time consuming, where you have to defeat all 38 legends on the game in one go. It’s challenging at first but then just feels like a chore.

The presentation of the game is good; the graphics are just as good as the Smackdown Vs Raw games. Also before you play any match in ‘WrestleMaina Tour Mode’ there is a video with rare WrestleMania footage of the match you have reliving, which is a nice touch.

WWE Legends Of Wrestlemania has a small roster, with only 38 legends, however if you have a WWE Smackdown Vs Raw 2009 game save you can import the entire roster from that game to have current superstars fight legends, which can be fun for a while. That's pretty much what this game is, fun for a while. For example I acquired the maximum 1000 gamerpoints in about a week but it can be done in a lot shorter time than this and the re-playability is one of the main things that lets this game down. There is not much reason to play this game again once you’ve completed ‘Wrestlemania Tour Mode’, ‘Legend Killer Mode’ and played all your fantasy matches between current WWE superstars and Legends.

I don’t really think casual gamers will be interested in this game at all, nor will the new generation of WWE fans who might feel pretty insulted by the simple control system and get bored very quickly. However for the ‘older’ generation of WWE fans this game will be fun, being able to relive the matches they watched when they were young with a simple control system.

7/10