Visually the design team did an excellent job of rendering the wrestling talent. All the wrestlers look even more real to life than they have in the past. The rings, crowds, and sets look a little sharper but not as drastic an improvement that the wrestlers have. That being said, there are some cases of the team reusing art assets from the previous game except not cleaning up anything. So we get storylines where last generation rendered Vince McMahon comes out to talk to current generation rendered talent. It would be like substituting the design of Mario from Super Mario on the NES into a modern Wii-U game. It almost feels though the sting of getting a yearly released game out the door meant that certain things would have to be skipped or left as is.
The biggest change from last year is the complete re-tooling of the grappling system.
In the previous years, the aggressor would just successfully pull off a move if they were strong enough and the opponent had sustained enough damage to be able to execute it. If you were on defense, your only reprieve would be a successful counter of the technique. It got to the point that two skilled players would have a match that would involve an infinite number of successful counters until someone finally succumbed to attrition of missed counters. Now, the grappling system starts with the two wrestlers cinching and you choose one of three types of grapple by pressing the corresponding button. Each grapple is strong against one grapple and weak to the other, and if each person chooses the same maneuver you re-do it. Whoever takes control can now start wearing down the opponent or set up to begin chain wrestling.
Ideally, this was to better represent how the smaller, skilled or technical wrestlers would be able to establish dominance over the monsters and powerhouses of the WWE and at the same time, level the playing field for PvP matches. Instead the mechanic slows the flow of a match, or in some cases drops it dead. Fast explosive matches can be stopped in an instant with someone grappling the opponent. It doesn't happen every match, but it did happen with enough regularity that I bring it up.
Switching to the game modes, there haven't been too many tweaks. The exceptional 30 Years of Wrestlemania mode from last year has been replaced with the 2K Showcase mode which lets you play out two of the longer storylines in recent memory – the HHH and Shawn Michaels feud and the John Cena and CM Punk feud. Who Got NXT allows you to play 5 matches in the burgeoning careers of the NXT wrestlers included in the roster (most of which have already been transitioned onto the main roster at this time); and the MyCareer mode is the opportunity to build a wrestler from the ground up. I found the MyCareer mode to be a little too much like turning a video game into a chore of just completing matches for the sake of gaining those ever so important experience points (to be able to upgrade my wrestler to pathetic from mega-pathetic).
WWE 2K15's roster is significantly smaller than what we were treated to last year – with some of the ancillary talent not getting as beautiful of a visual upgrade that the main talent did. (I'm looking at you Santino Marella!) Some of the promised DLC available to purchase separately or with the Season Pass will help flesh out your roster, but at the end of the day it kind of makes me want to just put this game on the shelf and pull out my copy of WWE 2K14 instead and wait for next year's version.
All in all, WWE 2K15 is not bad, it's just not as good as WWE 2K14 was.
- Tazman
The Good:
- Graphical content is definitely getting more out of the new equipment
- Counter frequency has definitely been scaled back from WWE2K14
The Bad:
- Rock/Paper/Scissors grappling system will not appeal to everyone
- Roster is significantly smaller than last year's release
