WWF Betrayal (Game Boy Color)
When a person sees the World Wrestling Federation logo on a video game, it would be quite safe to assume the game they’re getting would be some attempt to adapt the performance sport as faithfully as possible to the hardware. However, professional wrestling has always been a bit experimental, and for anyone who picked up WWF Betrayal on the Game Boy Color, they’d find one of the federation’s unusual ventures in the form of slotting some of its biggest superstars into a beat ’em up.
This strange brawler features four of the then biggest names in Professional Wrestling, their stories all tied to the same thin plot to guide the short six level experience. Whether you pick Stone Cold Steve Austin, Triple H, The Rock, or The Undertaker, things kick off with your character competing in the Heavyweight Championship title bout only to get nailed with an object from outside the ring and easily pinned by your opponent. It turns out, the three wrestlers you didn’t pick were conspiring against you and the WWF, kidnapping CEO Vince McMahon’s daughter and taking off. To motivate your wrestler of choice, Vince promises another shot at the championship if his daughter is rescued, but if you play as Triple H, Stephanie McMahon’s situation is given a bit more significance because he is her husband. The story, for what little there is, mostly just plugs in the wrestlers in the same role and gives them lines that evoke their ring performances or in Triple H’s case the fact his wife has been kidnapped, but this somewhat lazy approach of swapping in the wrestlers doesn’t just impact the plot.
No matter which of the four playable characters you pick, you’re essentially choosing to be the same character. They all fight in a mostly identical manner, and a fairly limited one at that. You pack a punch and a kick that is functionally identical across the cast, the punch stronger but with slightly shorter range than the kick and the kick packing a running variant that doesn’t really carry the dash’s momentum so much as make your character drift in the air to do a drop kick that brings the sprint to a quick halt. You can oddly repeat the aerial drop kick in place if you press the attack button quickly enough, but it really isn’t much of an improvement over the regular kick. The final attack in your repertoire is your character specific finisher, and this can only be activated if you manage to build up a power meter with repeated successful hits. Once it’s full, you execute your wrestler’s signature attack automatically, although it is pretty much just a different animation for each wrestler while dealing the same amount of damage and providing similar positional advantage. While you can find a few batons, trash cans to throw, and pipes to swing at enemies along the way to deal heavy damage, this is the extent of your offensive options, and it quickly becomes incredibly dull since almost every enemy will be approached in the same manner. Whale away with a punch or kick, and then the finishing move will likely wrap them up so you can approach the next one, your almost barren move pool meaning that WWF Betrayal grows repetitive incredibly fast in a genre that already often struggles to avoid the quick stagnation of smacking opponents around.
The enemies definitely don’t help much. Made up of referees, security guards, and street toughs for the most part, they almost all rely on approaching you and whacking you with their own incredibly basic attacks. Even when they get a little saucy with flips, ducking kicks, or their own weapons, there isn’t really any way to shift your approach methods or tactics. You just avoid their move and then hammer the attack button of choice, perhaps moving away if they have enough health that they don’t go down quickly. There is one enemy that adds in the proper amount of variety that keeps the game from being constant melee fighting, a man in sunglasses bringing what looks like a suitcase to the battle. This suitcase, however, is actually a gun, a projectile attack that forces you to actually consider when to stop moving to hit other enemies, how to position yourself to avoid his attacks, and how to prioritize the battles in the fight. Like many beat ’em ups of the time the action is viewed from the side but with a slanted floor you can move across freely, so maneuvering around the gunman as you try to either get to him or clear out any goons helping him shows that even the simple fighting mechanics could be acceptable with proper challenge, and he does get a bit more common as you press forward, mixing with the other enemy types to prevent the combat from being completely mindless.
What is a bit more mindless though are the boss fights. The three wrestlers you didn’t pick are turned into the game’s main antagonists, but their fights aren’t too exciting. They’ll be fighting you with the same moves you have, meaning they’ll try to rack up hits before executing their signature attack, but since they have comparable health and attacks, the fights are a bit harder than normal enemies while still not being too exciting. It’s a matter of just charging in and taking the hits you can land while backing off to avoid the same from your opponent, hoping to land the finishers that break a chunk out of the enemy’s health bar. You do fight them again as minibosses later on as well where they just have less health and are easier, but these fights don’t really pack much of a challenge outside of making sure you have the health to survive the licks you’ll take. Health is handled in an interesting manner though. While you can get health items from special enemies and environmental objects and can get other power-ups like a fully charged power meter for a time, your greatest asset is how the game treats the last few notches on your health bar. If you get knocked down to them, you get woozy, but if you mash buttons quickly enough, you won’t die, instead popping back into the fight with a small heal and preserving your limited lives. Having this option to avoid death isn’t a bad idea and could work well in many a brawler, but the concept also shows its faults here. If enemies have crowded you like the gun-toting guy or one of the bosses, you can get locked in a constant loop of taking damage, recovering from it with the button mash, only to take more damage before you can land a hit in edgewise, restarting the cycle until something finally gives. Starting on a new life can only set you so far back in the small levels though, but this option to stick out the fight longer might have worked better with better enemy AI or limited uses so less of the player’s time is spent trapped in a loop of entering and exiting the dazed state.
THE VERDICT: Transferring the moves and personalities of professional wrestlers into different video game genres isn’t a bad idea on paper, but that’s not really what WWF Betrayal did. Four interchangeable muscly men who resemble famous superstars use mostly generic attacks to handle enemies who respond with similarly bland resistance, the experience blurring together save for the marginal improvements of the boss fights and the appearance of the one enemy who uses projectiles. The mindless thrill of the beat ’em up genre means pounding generic bad guys might tickle the most primal part of the player’s brain, but the rest of it will be aching for excitement that this game just can’t provide.
And so, I give WWF Betrayal for Game Boy Color…
A TERRIBLE rating. Perhaps it was partly the game’s short length meaning it can’t drag the player down too deep into a repetitive slog or the faintest glimmer of the brawler genre’s appeal in things like managing the gunman’s attacks when he’s on screen, but WWF Betrayal feels like it was teetering on a knife’s edge that ultimately put it a small step above atrociousness. It commits many sins, one of the biggest being its unengaging gameplay loop, but it also lacks the kind of problems that make a game almost painful to play. WWF Betrayal can be pushed through and beaten quickly without it hurting too much, but for a game based on a performance spot built around drama, flashy moves, and over the top characters, the game came out incredibly reserved and lacking in character.
WayForward Technologies slapped the most basic brawler together they could and lightly applied a few wrestling elements to it, and if it hadn’t been using the WWF franchise in such a strange way, this would just be an incredibly generic brawler whose only unique ideas in the form of the power meter and recovery method were squandered by having no thought put into their implementation. The title may be referring to the conflict between the pro wrestling superstars, but the real betrayal in WWF Betrayal is luring in fans of the performance sport only to hand them a flavorless, unimaginative brawler.