PlayStation 2 review: 'Legends of Wrestling'

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By The D-Pad Destroyer

(IDG) -- Acclaim started so well. It brought out "WWF War Zone" at a time when the world had forgotten what wrestling games should be like. It gave gamers the first really flexible Create A Wrestler mode. It offered ringside commentary, decent graphics, and tons of secrets.

Then it all went down the pipe. "WWF Attitude" was "War Zone" with a couple of improvements, and it was followed by a family of awful ECW games that weren't good enough to justify the expense of the discs they were published on. Meanwhile, THQ took over the Quality Wrestling Game Title with its excellent N64 titles, and it cemented its mastery of the "sport" with "WWF SmackDown."

Acclaim lost the WWF license, then its ECW license (when Vince MacMahon bought the ECW), but it still felt a mandate to make wrestling games. It's akin to how the Chicago Bulls feel like they should keep playing basketball even though they're way past the glory days: It just gets comfortable, and you just can't stop.

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Along comes one of the best and most welcome ideas in wrestling game history: to take the best-loved wrestlers from yesteryear, like Hulk Hogan, the Iron Sheik, and the Rock N' Roll Express, and put them together in one game. Old-school wrestling fans would love it, and fans of modern wrestling would get a taste of history. It's a sure-fire hit!

What's done right in this game? Well, it has a roster of 42 old-school wrestlers with such standouts as Koko B. Ware, George "The Animal" Steele, and the Road Warriors. It also features an innovative combo system that makes playing the game one part "War Zone" and one part "PaRappa the Rapper" as you try to hit the right button in time to reverse grapples or counterattacks. When you're defending against an attack or a hold, a timing bar appears under your name. If you press the X button at the right time, you'll reverse the move. It's a cool idea that works fairly well, given the mind-numbingly slow pace of the game.

What's done wrong? Everything else. The slow, unintuitive controls underlie awful, slapped-together graphics and a bargain-bin soundtrack that features MIDI-rock sound-alikes of the wrestlers' classic themes. Wrestlers' entrances consist entirely of walking to the ring (in such fine arenas as Somewhere Downtown, Out in the Desert, etc.), posing for a split second, and then standing in ready position for way too long. Instead of ringside commentary, we get a soulless rock-drivel soundtrack. The game just seems tacked together as opposed to the slick, flashy presentation we're used to from "SmackDown." Not only that, but the game's lineup of wrestlers also seems lacking: Classic superstars like Rowdy Roddy Piper and Andre the Giant are conspicuously absent, while Rob van Dam and Sabu made it on the list.

This game is strictly a renter, something to play for an afternoon while you're waiting for "SmackDown" to come on TV. If the game had even a fraction of the personalities of the wrestling giants it features, it would be a contender. As it is, it's a promising jobber, there to lie while "SmackDown" delivers the People's Elbow.