WWE has released a video game based on its flagship sports-entertainment brand every year for nearly three decades. So it may come as a surprise that some of these newcomers have strayed from the franchise's roots in various ways. For starters, all traditional forms of locomotion have been removed, as you can instead call upon the power of ghost magic to hover menacingly around, under, and otherwise within the ring. The game even chooses to take a particularly strong stance against tattoos on custom wrestlers, punishing player Leviticus 19:28's flagrant violation by ruthlessly crashing their PlayStation 4. This choice is especially brave, since you're not playing your Neither do WWE Favorite Superstars, since performers in the conventional sense sometimes substitute a pair of incorporeal floating eyeballs with an adjoining cup. Effective. WWE 2K20 is a comedic horror title from Visual Concepts and its very existence is utterly baffling on almost every level imaginable.
Before we dive into the "fun" part, it's worth taking stock of what's been incorporated into the game this year. If you're familiar with the 2K series of WWE titles, 2K20's game offerings will be consistent. There is a huge range of exhibition match types where you can take on the AI and its friends, whether online or online, 2K Towers challenges return from last year and Universe mode is still present if you want to micro-manage the day-to-day. the operations of WWE's intimidating television program.
Showcase mode returns once again, this year featuring The Four Horsewomen – a quartet of prominent female wrestlers credited with reviving WWE's Women's Revolution. It's a neat, if repetitive, package after important matches and moments in the ladies' careers interspersed with endorsements of floating heads straight from the horses' mouths. The game itself shifts violently into the boring side of simple gameplay, with the actual match then recreated and animated in-engine, and the player tasked with performing certain actions in specific locations to advance the mode, providing outfits, performers and change. as a reward.
It's just a shame that the outfits and performers are the worst they've seen in years. It's an indisputable fact that 2K20 has been significantly degraded from previous years, with incorrect skin tones, large, deadpan eyes, and weak motion-capture inputs making up the mouth of the Goldberg - sorry. International megastar Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson looks like your friend Dave cosplays as Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson, and didn't even get us started in Macho Man Randy Savage. The guy is a wrestling icon, and to see him directed as a fagot aunt is an insult to his legacy. But we digress.
The inclusion of mixed tag team matches in 2K20 squads may or may not feature in the highly touted WWE 2K Originals mode, but we won't know. Although featured in the main menu, the mode remained inaccessible for the first few days after launch. It only went live at the time of writing to reveal a selection of creepy-themed modes, all of which were locked behind a payout schedule. We have never experienced such horror.
However, if we could take part in the Big Spook Parade, how could we come together? Well, the apparent obsession with iterating through complexity and raising the bar for entry has continued unabated. Don't get me wrong, the controls are good, they're just unnecessarily clunky. Different combinations of buttons on the shoulders and on the face activate specific abilities and moves, and we often found ourselves having to consult the Pause menu for help with the controls when faced with more precise match objectives. . Some moves - including knockdowns and signatures/finishers - have completely changed buttons this year for no apparent reason, although there's no denying that taking time to acclimate yields extremely satisfying results, and reversing the finisher from an opponent before immediately triggering yours will never make you feel like a real boy or girl grappling.
The problem with inversion however is that the processor will always take unfair advantage of this mechanism. The core of 2K20's combat is based on how many setbacks you've racked up. These regenerate over time and when faced with a human opponent there is a real tactical game of cat and mouse to watch as you observe how many flips you have accumulated and how close your opponent is to winning a finisher. After all, the last thing you want to do is reverse a standard punch and have nothing left to prevent a devastating game-ending maneuver. That is, unless your rival is the AI. If they're AI, all the rules are ignored, and they'll gladly take as much punishment as you're able to give them before – almost without fail – by taking untouched flips to instantly negate your signature or finisher. It completely destroys the rhythm of a match and it happens so often that we breathe a sigh of relief every time the computer lets us hit them with our biggest sweatiest grappling hook. It's both unrefined and a little disturbing.
Speaking of sophistication and disruption, WWE 2K20's flagship MyCareer mode is like watching a car crash in slow motion. It begins with the creation of a male and female superstar, designated in Tre and Red mode respectively. You then follow the inseparable best friends through their careers through flashback footage as they prepare to be inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame - the very latest goal on their joint list of fighting ambitions. It's a lot like Showcase Mode, only you'll be watching a lot of cutscenes and sometimes you'll have to meet in-match objectives, such as "Hit a strike while you're in the ring". It's one of the many reasons why My Career is incredibly bad.
For starters, the writing is odious. Our two leads are utterly implausible, with Red harboring almost all of Tre's secrets with his adoptive parents – yes, that's a real red thread – and Tre being an idiot, an absolute idiot. He often falls into situations that make the hard work and dedication required to be a full-time performer with WWE completely ridiculous, and in one exceptional moment near the start of the game, his tongue is stuck to an ice barrier for a while. game in a parking lot.
What we should say before going any further is that WWE 2K20's My Career mode seems to be written as a comedy. But no one is laughing. Red is portrayed as a hothead who often gets into pathetic teasing and comes out with shocking marks like this, "I'm going to give your grandma bed sores." First of all, who says that? And second, how can you expect us to root for this person? Especially since, even though you design the look of your Tre and Rouge, outside of extremely limited decision-making, the story is really on track. You have no choice but to play these chuckleheads, listen to their United Passions-level masturbatory pleasure about working for WWE, and you have no choice but to put up with a dreadful cutscene after dreadful cutscene.
Honestly, many of these animated segments look like what we imagine Night at the Museum would have looked like had it been directed by Stanley Kubrick. The environments are bland and ugly from the PS3 era, the textures constantly flicker, and the stiff mannequins portraying the wrestlers are seemingly unable to emit in a way that could be called "natural." They just stand between the lines, watching, sometimes shaking their whole body instead of normal human reactions, biding their time until you sleep. There are no more sweet dreams for you dear friend, there is only Peyton Royce and his impassive gaze.
The absurd party doesn't end there, however, with the Hall of Fame induction ceremony seemingly taking place so far in the future featuring robots wearing bow ties. At one point you even get into a SPACE CAR to take you to the meeting venue. WHO WRITTEN THIS? Honorable mention should go to Samoa Joe, however, for going out of his way to sound like he meant it, as almost all of the other voiceovers provided by real-life superstars sounded as if they had been recorded in a someone's little phone closet. It's absolutely the worst career mode we've seen in any WWE video game, and the whole thing feels utterly rude from start to finish.
Conclusion
Maybe something else, we're mad at WWE 2K20 for wasting precious time on our hands as we circle the swirling whirlwind of death. It's utterly baffling that a game of this magnitude was released in such a state. Whether you want to blame the outgoing developers, poor management, or a rushed development cycle, there's no denying that this title needed more time in the oven. We first wondered why 2K wasn't so eager to send us their latest WWE Title, but after playing one of the biggest flops of 2019, we're starting to see why.
- Only WWE game on the market
- MyCareer has an end
- Clumsy and complicated controls
- Nightmarish Realization of WWE Real World Artists
- Brimming with bugs and performance issues
- Some of the worst writing ever seen in a video game
- MyCareer has a start
Bad 3/10
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