WWE 2K Battlegrounds (Xbox One)

While yearly sports game releases generally make plenty of money easily without needing to change their formulas much, the WWE 2K series hit a snag when its normal developer left and WWE 2K20 had to be developed by an entirely new team in a short timeframe. The poor fan reaction and plethora of bugs stained that game’s reputation, but publisher 2K Sports still wanted a wrestling game out next year to make use of the license, so a different direction was chosen to avoid the problem the wrestling sim series hit with its previous titles. With WWE 2K Battlegrounds, the series would toss away realism in favor of over the top moves, ridiculous ring hazards, a silly storyline, and a questionable visual aesthetic that clearly was aiming to be a more casual approach to a professional wrestling experience.

The art direction is certainly one of the more unusual choices made for this less serious wrestling game, wrestling superstars rendered as squat versions of themselves that evoke action figures like the large-headed Stretch Armstrong variants. With almost normal looking but muscular upper bodies attached to small waists and legs it certainly immediately conveys the idea this game is aiming for something more cartoonish in quality, but the wrestlers themselves usually have their most striking features to remain identifiable despite many of the plainer ones looking rather generic and the often lithe divas seem stretched out too much by the art direction’s proportions. Entrances are also slow-going affairs where people drop in by crates so its rarely worth watching the wrestlers actually enter the arena, the only place you’ll really see a unique personal touch to a wrestler being in their taunts. Making your own wrestler is unfortunately rather straightforward when it comes to their appearance, the player mostly given the means to make a standard looking wrestler unless they want to start dipping into the purchasable cosmetic items that would help them stand out more.

Playing the game normally will slowly level up your profile to earn unlockables naturally and build up a currency that can be spent on customization options and special wrestlers, but the game makes sure this process is a slow one so as to not so subtly push you towards spending real money on the more interesting content. While playing through 100% of the game’s campaign gave me a fair bit of these special cash, the more famous and special wrestlers are all priced to a point where all that work was only really going to pay off with two big name wrestlers. Playing through the campaign does allow you to unlock some more famous characters without purchases to buff up the unexciting opening roster of the game, so fans of John Cena or Alexa Bliss will be pleased to see it doesn’t take much elbow grease to gain access to them. Unfortunately, legends like Andre the Giant, Goldberg, and Randy Savage must be purchased so they’re priced appropriately to drain out your reserves. Perhaps it’s good news then that for the most part, the wrestlers featured in WWE 2K Battlegrounds aren’t executing the same maneuvers they became famous for in the ring, as all but the biggest Superstars are instead slotted into one of the game’s five fighting styles so that they play similarly to anyone else of that type and thus aren’t as tempting to buy.

The actual wrestling in WWE 2K Battlegrounds is closely tied to the regular rules of WWE’s professional wrestling but without any referee to call people out for going over the top with the violent maneuvers. The most reliable method of victory is wearing down your opponent enough with attacks, throws, and weapons pulled from underneath the ring so that they can’t resist your attempt to pin them for a three count. Wrestlers can also be eliminated if they spend too long outside of the ring, but the last normal elimination method is forcing your opponent to submit with a submission hold. This is represented in game as a meter that both wrestlers will try to fill with button mashing first, but depending on the state of the battle and the wrestlers sometimes a submission is impossible and most of the time it is fairly unlikely. Never did I get a submission win on purpose, it just seemed to randomly work at times that seemed no different from other attempts and even included the bafflingly out of character situation where The Undertaker quickly and willingly submitted at Wrestlemania, the event he became famous for winning at 21 years in a row. Working your opponent over to make the pin possible is certainly meant to be the main focus with the other win conditions fringe cases, but building up to a pin can unfortunately be a rather tedious affair.

When starting out, the over the top moves of WWE 2K Battlegrounds can impress with their generally flashiness. Leaping up twenty feet to slam another wrestling into the ring with fire or light effects is definitely impressive the first few times, and even your basic combos usually culminate with a super-powered final strike wreathed in energy. Any move with such an effect requires you to spend some of your special move energy though, this earned by landing more traditional hits such as your basic punch and kick combos. Once the AI difficulty reaches a certain point though it guards against such attacks fairly easily and even your own efforts to parry their moves can be rather reliable thanks to the attack animations being easy to identify and deflect. Besides situational options like climbing up on the ropes to slam down on an opponent, throws and grabs make up most of the rest of your combat options. Here you can do all sorts of piledrivers, suplexes, and leaping slams with a simple flick of the right control stick, with LT enhancing the move with power in a way similar to how you can execute a special strike by pressing a punch or kick button while holding the trigger.  However, whether you’re trying to do a throw or a similar maneuver like the Irish Whip where you hurl a foe towards the ropes so they bounce back for a follow-up strike, the opponent has a brief window to reverse the action. All it takes is pressing the button displayed in a small time window, and while this can be difficult to execute when you’re getting used to the game at the start, soon human players and computer players both are more likely to pull off a reversal than they are a successful normal throw. A reversal does spend some of that special energy to pull off, but unless you want to blow it all with your heavy hitting finishing move, it is easy enough to retain a reserve specifically for preventing an attack type that is vital to dealing damage.

Despite the counter options you will still land hits and throws with some regularity so its not like you’re being constantly stonewalled by opponents, but it does lead to the fights feeling like your input often goes unrewarded or ends up screwing yourself over instead. If your throws keep getting reversed and your attacks blocked, your other options are things like dragging weapons out that can also be blocked or trying to use the specific gimmick of the arena to your advantage. The rings in this game are called Battlegrounds and will feature some special attack option like throwing an opponent to hungry gators on the side of the Everglades ring, stealing the bagpipes from a Scotsman to assault your foe’s ears in Scotland, or perhaps strangest of all using a remote control to guide a goat into ramming people while in Mexico. These are good for heavy assured damage even if they can’t be used often, but even these become predictable parts of the battle flow. A bit too much action can either be too easy because the AI is set low for that battle or become tedious as landing hits feels more like your opponent forgot to counter rather than the player using a move strategically.

Different wrestlers do have different strengths based on what archetype they slot into though, so sometimes a heavy hitting type might be able to break through guards while ones with strange throws can bypass the ability to reverse a move with their odd approaches. The Powerhouses pack the most strength and can easily pick up any other wrestler at the cost of low agility, Technicians play more into throws and reversals, High-Flyers tend to be fast and can do fancy throws by leaping off the ropes, Brawlers focus on the simple hits, and the All-Rounder is unsurprisingly the middle of the road when it comes to their capabilities in these departments. They do all play different from each other and the need to adjust your strategy some based on what you’re using and what you’re facing does help the game escape being a counter fest as certain stat advantages push past that problem. To try and get the player to fight in more interesting ways than whatever attacks work best the game also has an audience mechanic where they’ll request specific actions from a wrestler and executing them has a few perks. If the audience is on your side your opponent has to try harder to escape pins, and a different special meter can build up to let you execute some strange abilities. These can range from starting to regenerate health, the announcers of the match not even trying to hide its some sort of supernatural healing, to something like slamming your fist into the ring to cause an earthquake. Different moves require more power based on how good they are, so something like wreathing you fists in flame for more damage isn’t as expensive as freezing your foe with frost breath, and the audience favor system means they won’t appear too often or early in a match to completely detract from trying to skillfully use your wrestler’s advantages well. In fact, it’s an interesting comeback option that rewards you for varying your play, so playing into it some can help you overcome overly defensive foes.

Beyond the simple one on one wrestling matches that make up most of the play, there are a few different modes in WWE 2K Battlegrounds, but unsurprisingly they are just as rocky in quality as the regular fight mechanics are. The cage matches are particularly bad, money appearing either on the ground or on the cage walls for the wrestlers to grab. Once enough has been gathered by a wrestler they then need to escape the cage, but it’s easy to climb up on the wall, shake off the opponent trying to pull you down, and build up cash unopposed. The battle to stay on the cage wall is a button mashing contest that can be harder if you’ve been softened up, but going for cash early and mashing well can invalidate much of the challenge, the player only really needing to make sure to avoid the periods of electrified metal and mash well if the other wrestler is going for the cash instead. Three way and four way fights are a race to be the first to pin one of the other opponents before they can do the same, but you can easily interrupt a pin with a small kick, which lead to one extremely long match I played where everyone was completely out of health but every pin attempt was interrupted and any attempt to incapacitate another wrestler so they wouldn’t interrupt never stuck. Tag Team Matches can have a similar issue, the two on two nominally meant to only have one wrestler in the ring from each side but they run in when a pin is initiated to interrupt. You can at least force a disqualification if you keep the opponent’s backup in the ring too long, and the Tornado Tag variation where all four wrestlers fight at once does allow for one teammate to better distract the backup wrestler while you pin so it won’t drag as much. Lastly, the Royal Rumbles have new wrestlers enter the ring periodically with the goal being to be the last man standing after everyone else has been thrown over the top rope, this mostly an endurance test and suitably chaotic at times depending on how packed the arena gets. King of the Battlegrounds turns this into an online endless rumble where new players can keep joining, which is a nifty idea in concept although players like to gang up or avoid conflict so it doesn’t realize its full potential.

The campaign mode actually a provides a good amount of content and teaches you the ropes of the game fairly well, although it is likely where the honeymoon period of being introduced to the game slowly fades to realizing how basic the battles are and how your options are more limited than they first appear. Campaign mode follows the story of Paul Heyman searching for new talent for the WWE brand. Employing retired superstar Stone Cold Steve Austin to go across the globe to recruit new wrestlers, Steve Austin finds himself recruiting wrestlers from unusual locales like a Scottish castle, the Florida swamp, and a Detroit autoshop. Most of these newly invented novice wrestlers have a different specialty like Jessica Johnson being the Powerhouse and the Velle sisters competing in the tag team events, but Bolo Reynolds and Gabriel Pierce are both All-Rounders so they’re a bit interchangeable. Each story segments has you play as one of these novices working their way up to competing at the big Wrestlemania event, different wrestlers of note appearing for a few required battles and some optional ones that tend to come with the unlockable powers, wrestlers, and rings as rewards. Despite the story being a simple tale of recruiting rookies, the game does have a decent sense of humor in its comic book cutscenes, one that even comes across if you don’t know the athletes involved. Mostly it’s just unexpected goofiness to match the game’s lighter tone, with a lot of self-deprecation like taking a lot of jabs at WWE’s owner Vince McMahon for being cheap and mean or having a tough wrestler come up short in a silly way. The joviality of it helps to make it actually worth paying attention to, but the wrestling involved in the story still feels weak.

THE VERDICT: While the campaign of WWE 2K Battlegrounds tells a sometimes funny tale that does a good job showcasing all of the game’s different modes and features, it also helps the shallowness of the experience sink in. When the AI is competent the battle system leans too hard into reversals, certain modes like three way battles can drag while others like cage match can prove too easy, and a lot of the notable wrestlers or customization features are locked behind long grinds through basic wrestling matches or forking over real cash for a character who probably doesn’t even play like their real world counterpart. The special abilities and the different character class focuses can turn things on their head at least, and some of the more whimsical elements like insane throws or ring hazards make up for the odd appearance of the wrestlers, but the main issue remains that the core wrestling wears out its welcome due to its most important attack and defense options not playing together well.

And so, I give WWE 2K Battlegrounds for Xbox One…

A BAD rating. WWE 2K Battlegrounds isn’t so poorly balanced that you never land a hit, but the fact that reversals and guarding do so much to counter almost all of your options does mean the sense of control over the fight diminishes once you face foes smart enough to use them to their potential. Throws would probably be too strong without the threat of reversal and often are when the campaign is starting out and counters are far less common, but finding an effective battle style usually involves exploiting something like countering your opponent’s every throw or hitting with an unusual move unique to the class. Regular moves will land inevitably since countering isn’t a brainless process at least, but the defense seems to be given too much say over whether a hit lands rather than the player trying to cook up a way around such options. It’s hard to fault a lot of the gimmickry when it would be a fine enough addition if the regular wrestling was compelling enough, and coupled with the game trying to fleece you by locking some of its biggest celebrities behind microtransactions or investing a lot of time into the shallow action, it makes it hard to appreciate the areas where things come together alright.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting to do a more fantastical take on professional wrestling, and this isn’t even the first time some of these superstars have found themselves in a game that was going for style over authentic simulation. A lot of the moves definitely look impressive or sound crazy when they’re first introduced, but pulling them off just isn’t that rewarding when your personal effectiveness is more often reliant on your opponent’s behavior than your own. Being a more cartoonish wrestler did not mean it had to be simplified to the point of shallowness, but unfortunately WWE 2K Battlegrounds ends up with insane visuals but weak mechanics.