Since the downfalls of World Championship Wrestling (WCW) and Extreme Championship Wrestling (ECW) and their subsequent purchases by the WWE, the only licensed wrestling games have been from WWE. Enter TNA iMPACT! to the market.
TNA iMPACT! features 25 licensed TNA wrestlers, and 7 more unlockable wrestlers such as Benny and Lenny, a set of clowns, and Suicide, the protagonist of the Story Mode. While the last Smackdown vs. Raw game featured 57 wrestlers, we understand that TNA is not as large of a promotion as the WWE.
Our problem with only 32 wrestlers is not with the number; it’s with the fact that most of the wrestlers have very little variance in their move sets. Each character seems to have a DDT, a running shoulder block, a jawbreaker, and some sort of low blow. The only real thing that separates Shark Boy from Kurt Angle or any other wrestler is their respective finishing maneuver. Sure, there may be one or two differences between most wrestlers, but every wrestler feels mostly the same.
Beyond that, each wrestler only has a few moves. You have three or four weak grapples, four or so strong grapples, a few punches, kicks, running moves, and aerial moves. It doesn’t get much more complex than that. The game is easy to pick up and play with these moves, but lacks the depth of previous wrestling titles. The controls fit well with the game, however, as pulling off all your moves is simple and fluid. It can get confusing with B being the default action button to pin, exit the ring, and climb the turnbuckle. If you’re trying to pin a guy in the corner, it’s anyone’s guess what will actually happen when you press the B button.
The Create A Wrestler features are somewhat shallow as well. When you first create your story mode character, you pick a move set like high flyer, and that’s it. You can’t change any of the moves. You can only unlock moves by gaining style points in your matches, which come from hitting big moves. Unlocking most of the moves doesn’t happen through your first play through of story mode, which was a bit annoying. The options are limited in most places like hair, clothes and whatnot. Again, you won’t be creating anything lavish like in the Smackdown series.
The game has all your favorite match types: standard, tag team, free for alls, submission matches and falls count everywhere. But the game’s signature match is the Ultimate X match. The premise is most similar to a ladder match, with some tweaks. Instead of using a ladder to get the X suspended above the ring, you have to climb cables attached to four of the six turnbuckles and climb to the center of the ring to get the X. Once you get there, a meter shows and you must time a button press to slowly grab the X. Combat shifts to the air, as you hang on and attack any oncomers. It is a bit easy, as you can forgo any real combat and immediately go for the X. We would have liked to see a few more match types, especially a Six Sides of Steel match.
The bulk of the game is found in the aforementioned Story Mode. You play as a wrestler named Suicide, who after rising through TNA and winning the title is beaten and left for dead in Mexico. As you struggle to remember your identity, you return to TNA and rise through the ranks again. The cut scenes are well done, with real voice acting and some truly funny points. It has a decent story to it, and only really drags while you’re in the tag team division. Our only real problem with the story was with the final match, where your opponent is much more overpowered than you, almost to the point of frustration. Once you finish the story though, there’s no incentive to go back and play again, except to get more style points to unlock all the wrestlers.
The programming of the game definitely has some weird points. For one, most moves don’t keep your opponent on the ground for any length of time, minus finishers and a random move here and there. You can jump from the turnbuckle to the floor, miss your opponent, and shake it off like there’s no problem, despite the fact you just landed on your head on concrete. It’s very weird that there are no grapples for an opponent laying on his stomach. If you attempt a move, you’ll just whiff, and then the opponent will roll over so you can do a move while he now lies on his back. Also, while in the ring, the AI seems more than willing to just stand in the middle of the ring and let you rain aerial moves down on them.
The worst is in the tag team matches. During a tag team match against Tomko and AJ Styles, Tomko hit his finisher, the Fall Away Slam, which left me sitting dead for rights next to my tag team partner Eric Young. Tomko strolls over and pins me for the win, while Young sat there and watched us lose. Needless to say, it was very frustrating.
The gameplay flows very fluidly, however. Instead of getting caught in lengthy animations, you can punch a guy, hit him with a DDT, and put him in a chokehold without waiting for your opponent to finish writhing on the ground in pain. The reversal system is a nice touch, as most moves can be easy reversed with a press of the right bumper button, including reversals. Some very cool chains can be created using this, although the AI has much more ease in reversing moves.
All of that goes out the window when the game is taken online. First off, half of the matches don’t connect. When you finally get into a match, winning or losing is incredibly simple. I knew I was going to bad compared to elite of the game online, but within 30 seconds, I found myself pinned. I tried this myself. Using Shark Boy, I hit a few punches, landed a DDT, pinned my opponent, and won. Escaping a pin is near impossible online, as the server doesn’t seem to register you flicking the stick back and foth.
The game isn’t without its strong points. The graphics are great, with wrestlers looking almost identical with their real life counterparts. The animations are motion capped and look excellent as well. The venues look great as well, from the rundown Mexican ring to the lavish rings for some of the pay per views.
The sound effects are well done, even if some are a bit extravagant. The real life voice acting was a nice touch, something we didn’t see out of the Smackdown series later in the series. However, the announcers are awful. They only have a few lines, and some can be weird, like when one of the announcers goes nuts over a simple move like an Irish Whip. By the end of the story mode, I felt like throwing my controller when the announcer told me that the Hurricarana was direct from Mexico… yet again.
The game has a lot of promise. If it lived up to the initial hype of thousands of motion capped moves, we may have seen TNA iMPACT! dethrone Smackdown on its first try. Instead, you get a game with a fun control set, great graphics and animations, but lacking in originality and variety. It’s a decent start, but we really can’t recommend anything more than a rental.
