RRP AU$99.00
Good: Huge roster of classic wrestlers, Dream matchups, .
Bad: Buggy play interface, Idiotic CPU AI, .
Showdown has some appeal for fans of 70's and 80's 'classic' wrestling, but it's too buggy to be a serious purchase for anyone else.
First, a quick history lesson. Acclaim did, for a long while, hold the then-WWF licence for wrestling games, putting out a number of quite successful titles before losing the licence to THQ, who now use it essentially as a licence to print money. After a brief flirtation with the dying ECW promotion, Acclaim moved over to producing games under the Legends Of Wrestling banner. The concept is simple enough -- sign up as many 'Legends' of professional wrestling as possible, render them as though it were their heyday, and let them create chaos in the squared circle.
The vast majority of the grapplers present in the previous two games make the transition to Showdown, although some of the PAL specific wrestlers who appeared in LOW 2 such as Giant Haystacks are MIA. Oddly enough, owing to having tied down his visual likeness during a non-contract period, current WWE champion Eddie Guerrero is also a Legend on offer. New to Showdown are names such as Sting, Diamond Dallas Page, "The American Dream" Dusty Rhodes and The Ultimate Warrior.
Showdown's actual grappling mechanics have undergone a subtle evolution. Gone is the ISP grappling system used in the previous two games, and in comes an odd mix of the grappling styles of those games and THQ's Smackdown series. One button performs quick (and easily reversible) grapples, while another performs slow (but easily strikeable) tie-ups, from where a variety of moves can be undertaken. The momentum meter, which in previous Legends titles allowed you to expertly judge when to reverse a move, is gone. The removal of the momentum meter means that you only rarely see the kind of chain-wrestling reversals that graced the first two games in the series. What you get in its place is an all-purpose reversals button (X on the Xbox controller); there's an option for the game to show you when to use it contextually, but you'll still have to get your timing down pat in order to fully utilize reversals. The gaming upshot of this is that it's much harder to reverse moves via button press in Showdown, although in certain circumstances you're better off attacking in order to reverse anyway.
Showdown is arguably a bit of a niche title; while wrestling games are big business, a game based on the legends of the sport, and focussing largely on the way they wrestled up to thirty years ago is a bit of a stretch. If you're used to the fast-paced high-flying action of a WWE Smackdown! game, for example, you'll find Showdown to be a bit grounded and slow. It's a good nod to what these wrestlers were capable of, and certainly a step above the two previous Legends games, which would often see heavyweights like Andre The Giant crack out a pedigree, just for the sake of it.
Showdown offers the usual run of exhibition-style gameplay modes, with up to eight grapplers in action at any one time, as well as two context-specific modes. Classic matches mode challenges you with 15 different historical scenarios, such as the legendary match between Ricky "The Dragon" Steamboat and Macho Man Randy Savage at Wrestlemania 3. Acclaim doesn't own the right to the Wrestlemania logo, of course, but they've signed up both wrestlers, and are more than happy to dump you in mid-match in a precarious position. Playing through the classic matches is a lot of fun for old-time grappling fans, although we wish there were more scenarios and that the eventual reward (a congratulatory splash screen) was a bit better.
The other contextual mode is the Showdown Challenge, which replaces LOW 2's career mode. Here you start with a rookie wrestler in the 70's and take him through to the 90's before taking on the self-proclaimed icon of professional wrestling, Hulk Hogan. In each decade you'll have to fight your way through five matches with a rough scenario surrounding most of them. This does boil down to having to win each match -- there's little of the intrigue of the story mode present in Smackdown! Here Comes The Pain, for example.
Rather than utilise the graphics scheme that saw you battle with what looked like wrestling action figures, Showdown uses some exceptionally well realised models of its roster of classic wrestlers. In a very nice nod to wrestling history, each wrestler's outfits represents a different era in that wrestler's evolution - so for example, it's possible to wrestle as surfer-looking "Man called Sting" era Sting, or the later Crow-inspired look. He's even got different knockoffs of his theme tune to accompany him to ring. To accentuate the 'legendary' status of your grapplers, there's a fair amount of slow motion and motion blur thrown around for effect - although in the case of Hulk Hogan, that could just be his walking speed anyway. While LOW 2 was notable for the extreme quantities of blood that would stain the ring mat, that's an area that's been significantly downplayed in Showdown, where you'll strain to make out a brief trickle of blood going down your wrestler's face.
Sadly, the improvements that have been made in the game's visuals don't extend to the animation, which suffers from exactly the same problems that have bugged the series since its inception, and that Acclaim's really not been able to get past since its days of making WWF games for the PlayStation. Key frames of animation are missing, and strange bugs pop up without rhyme or reason. Intermittently you'll perform a move on a foe who's floating away from you (piledrivers and crucifix powerbombs are particularly prone to this problem) and all too often you'll lose the feeling of a 'real' match when you stop to consider how your punch just went clean through someone else's head. After three cracks at the Legends Of Wrestling franchise, this is something that Acclaim should have gotten right, but they just plain haven't - yet.
On the flip side, Showdown's audio is actually quite good for a title lacking any kind of real-world wrestling company licence. Commentary is provided by the team of Tony Schiavone, Larry "The Living Legend" Zybysko and Bobby "The Brain" Heenan, although it's clear from his inflection that Heenan was still recovering from his recent bout with throat cancer when he recorded his audio. Ring entrances are provided by Gary Michael Capetta, and the musical entrances are remarkably close knockoffs of the themes each wrestler used back in their heyday.
Showdown is a significant improvement on its predecessors, but for many gamers the bugs that are still present in the series three games in will be enough to put them off the title for good. THQ's announced schedule for wrestling titles may well play into Acclaim's hands here, as aside from a GameCube release, wrestling-hungry video gamers will have to wait until 2005 to get their next licensed grappling fixes. Ultimately it's a title that will appeal to anyone who was a 70's or 80's wrestling fan, but beyond that it's probably a safer rental title rather than a purchase.
