WCW/NWO Revenge Review

For Nintendo 64

Rating: Good
   WCW/NWO Revenge is much better than last year's World Tour, but it still
doesn't have the replay value to make it a must-have game.  Revenge uses 
the same engine as World Tour.  The engine has been made much faster and 
smoother, but it's still the same game at heart.  Revenge also features 
many more wrestlers than World Tour.  A whopping 44 wrestlers are playable 
from the start (with more hidden and 12 fictional wrestlers in there as 
well).  
   The game's intro starts out oddly with a very slow moving truck driving 
along.  Sting then steps out onto the road and the truck driver (who looks 
like Randy Savage) slows down, honks, and says "What?"  That's exactly what
I was thinking.  What?  Fortunately, this bizarre sequence is followed by a
cool series of clips of the game's many new animations, which include lots 
of new moves and a unique ring entrance for every wrestler.
   The gameplay has been tweaked to make submissions far more powerful.  
Now a wrestler who may have enough energy to kick out after a 1-count will 
often tap out if put in a submission hold.  However, the designers of the 
game have made up for this by making it easier to get to the ropes to break
the hold.  Also, wrestlers now come to the ring with their managers, and 
occasionally a wrestler's enemy will run out during a match to beat him up.
There is now a slow motion Instant Replay that automatically starts at the 
end of each match so you can see exactly how you won or lost the match.  
Battery back-up is now included, so you don't need a Controller Pak to save
your data.  The graphics are now almost completely devoid of jagged edges, 
and they portray their real-life counterparts very well.  
   Unfortunately, it seems that with every option and improvement THQ made,
they took out some things that should have been left in the game.  When I 
first put the game in my N64 and got to the main menu, my first thought 
(after, "Man, that music is repetitive") was "Where the heck are the League
and Tournament modes?"  I spent most of my time in World Tour playing the 
League mode, in which every wrestler would face every wrestler once and get
three points for a win and one point for a tie, with the winner being the 
wrestler with the most points at the end.  This option added a lot of depth
to the game, but it's not in Revenge, and in its place is a Championship 
Mode that grows tiresome almost immediately.  Rather than rewarding you for
every win and punishing you for every loss, the Championship Mode just 
punishes you for every loss.  You could win match after match in 
Championship Mode and get no recognition, but one loss and you have to 
start all the way over from the beginning.  Lame.
   The list of major flaws doesn't end there.  THQ still hasn't found a 
balanced difficulty level (Normal is still too easy and Hard is still too 
hard).  The ability to create your own wrestler and change different 
wrestlers' alliances from WCW to the NWO is actually nothing more than a 
crappy Costume Editor. I was really excited about the 40-man Battle Royal, 
only to find that you can only pick the first four guys (everybody after 
that is selected by the computer).  Tag team matches end when one man is 
pinned or submits; you can no longer make it so that both members of a team
have to be beaten in order for the match to end.  And where the heck is Ric
Flair?  Ric Flair was the best performer in wrestling, both in the ring and
behind the mic, for over 10 full years, and this is the thanks he gets?  
WCW agrees to let jobbers like Sick Boy and Reese be in the game, but not 
the man who single-handedly kept them afloat when business went down?  
That's not fair to Flair.
   The lack of many key options and features ensure that WCW/NWO Revenge 
gets old within a few days.  However, it eats WWF War Zone for breakfast, 
largely because its control set-up is so intuitive.  More than anything, 
Revenge is making me very excited about what's going to happen when THQ 
gets its hands on the WWF license in late 1999.  I can just picture the 
engine used to create World Tour and Revenge with improved gameplay, added 
features, and dozens of WWF wrestlers.  Somebody get me a bib, because I'm 
starting to drool.
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WCW Vs. NWO: World Tour Review
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