WWE: Day Of Reckoning

Photo gallery: WWE: Day Of Reckoning

It's taken long enough, but Gamecube owners who happen to be wrestling fans finally have a game that they can show to their PS2-owning friends and boast about in WWE: Day Of Reckoning. Now, I suspect that the period of boasting will be remarkably short -- it's only a few months before the online-capable WWE: Smackdown Vs Raw hits store shelves -- but for the moment, there's little that can touch Day Of Reckoning for pure playability, grappling accuracy, and, most importantly, all around fun.

In gameplay terms, if you did play last year's Wrestlemania XIX, you'll be able to fall straight into playing Day Of Reckoning -- the basic grappling and striking engine is essentially identical, and if you're new to the series the sometimes turgid tutorial will have you up and frog-splashing quicker than you can say R-V-D. It's a solid system, more or less ripped straight from the engine AKI used on its older N64 titles (and is still using in titles like Def Jam: Fight For NY, which for some reason is available for the Gamecube, but not in Australia), and aside from being somewhat weak in the area of submission fighting, it works pretty well.

Day Of Reckoning brings two minor gameplay tweaks to the table -- a weight system that makes it harder for the little guys to slam the bigger ones, which is as it should be, and a you've-got-nothing-left-to-lose momentum shift feature. The weight system is pretty simply implemented, and occurs whenever you try to shift an otherwise immoveable huge grappler -- Andre The Giant, for example, is a hidden character who is heavy enough to have a weight advantage over his lesser foes. Rapidly pressing the A button will build up a meter -- fill it quick enough and Andre and chums will be tasting canvas. Fail to mash fast enough, and it's a trip to the chiropractors and plenty of painkillers in your diet from then on. It's hardly a step of genius -- and sometimes you'll be so annoyed by this button mashing mechanism that you'll just give up.

The momentum shift feature is, however, a great improvement, and a genuine attempt to bring some of the theatrical stylings of Pro Wrestling into the game. If you're at the point of total collapse, you can attempt a momentum shift -- good guy wrestlers enjoy a period of brief invulnerability, while bad guys strike their foes right where they're most vulnerable -- by pressing A and B together at the right time, shifting the momentum from your foe to you. You can only do one momentum shift per match, so timing is critical -- as is making the most of your sudden advantage.

Now, you may be thinking that it's a huge call to say that Day Of Reckoning is better than last year's PS2 WWE: Smackdown Here Comes The Pain, and in many ways they're the same game -- Day of Reckoning picks up the Bra & Panties match but not the Elimination Chamber Match (Why, oh why not the other way around?) from Smackdown, and adds two important elements that make it the superior of that title. For a start, any move can be broken up by hitting either combatant -- something you can't do in the Smackdown titles. Secondly, unlike the Smackdown titles, characters won't just run or walk clear off an edge that would otherwise cause disaster -- instead, they've got to be forcibly thrown off. I've lost track of the number of times I've cursed both omissions in the Smackdown games, and I'm still not sure why they're not in there. If I'm lucky, perhaps Raw Vs Smackdown will fix that problem up.

At the heart of any wrestling game is the story mode, and Day Of Reckoning takes a pretty tried and tested path -- you start off creating your wrestler and working your way up through the WWE developmental leagues, through Sunday Night Heat and finally onto either the Raw or Smackdown brand shows, where you can challenge for championship gold. Some might think that innovative, but it's been used many times before, in titles like WWF No Mercy (N64) or even WWF Attitude (PSone).

The story mode is highly linear, but it's not terribly bad, and fans of wrestling will want to see it through to its logical conclusion. Along the way you'll unlock plenty of hidden wrestlers (including, finally, Bret "The Hitman" Hart, absent from WWE games for many a long year) and cash to buy more create-a-wrestler parts, arenas to fight in and even weapons to hit each other with while the ref's been sadly knocked unconscious by a blow you clearly meant to hit your opponent with. Some fans may be annoyed that they can't choose to play as a WWE superstar, but as most of them have a speaking role in the story mode, and it'd be a bit strange to argue that The Rock needed to go back to developmental training, it's understandable within the story context.

Part of what gives wrestling games appeal beyond the core wrestling crowd is undoubtedly the care and attention put into the create-a-wrestler modes that these titles offer, and, like its predecessors, and the remarkably similar Smackdown titles, Day of Reckoning doesn't disappoint. Want to create a 20 stone hairy guy in a pink tutu? It can be done. For some, the sheer level of detail available may be a little daunting, but others, I suspect, will spend more time carefully crafting themselves -- or others -- than they actually will grappling.

If there's a weak point in Day Of Reckoning, it's arguably the game's audio. While it boasts a solid array of genuine WWE entrance themes, and even some licensed tracks, there just aren't enough of them, and as such you'll hear the same tunes again, and again, and again. It's a common complaint for any sports title, though, so you may not find it as grating as I did.

Day Of Reckoning takes all the basic things that developers Yukes and THQ have been putting into the previous WWE Gamecube titles, removes the silly and annoying Revenge mode that made last year's Wrestlemania XIX such a disaster, and the end result is a game that anyone who likes fighting games (and especially anyone who likes wrestling) shouldn't miss.