Wrestling All Star Warrior

Inviting players to generate fantasy ultimately determine the greatest all time.

Inviting players to generate fantasy ultimately determine the greatest all time.

Wrestling All Stars encompasses a fluid, intuitive and original gameplay style, creating a highly competitive environment and an engaging spectacle. Packed with high-flying, hard hitting and over the top action, player will explore a variety of responsive quick grapples, strong grapples, standing and running attacks, as well as combination sequences

Championship belts can change hands, over and over again, sometimes shifting more than once in the same week. Fan-favorite faces can turn heel and have arenas full of fans cursing the same names they'd cheered just half a year earlier.

Characters are action figure versions of themselves with gigantic torsos and booming biceps. Moves are the trademarks you'd know from watching folks like the Rock and Jake "the Snake" Roberts, but they're embellished with flips

Wrestling All Stars also has a great concept for gameplay, but I think the control scheme trips it up. There are strike and grapple buttons, health bars, finishing move meters and a bunch of other stuff that's simple for a player to look at and understand. That's groovy. Being able to get in and do an awesome powerbomb or charge up a punch is rewarding and how a game designed to capture an audience lured in by Rowdy Roddy Piper should play.

Longtime followers of the Wrestling All Star will especially enjoy its premise of bringing together Superstars of the modern era and Legends of decades past. And, as a wrestling fan myself, it is certainly satisfying to take a relatively new face like John Cena and have

him prove himself against someone I watched as a kid

The first totally new part of this port is Score Scramble. It's a new mode available under Exhibition matches, and it introduces running point totals to otherwise standard matches -- you score points for successfully striking or grappling your opponent, and the winner is the one who scores more in under three minutes. This is a fine mode, and challenging yourself to achieve higher and higher scores over time could add some lasting value to this version -- but, if you're just playing to win the current match, it's easy to just slap the other guy once and then run away from him for three minutes straight to earn a too-easy victory.

The second new mode is the Gauntlet, a continuous onslaught of wrestlers. You start off in a normal one-on-one match, but when you pin or K.O. your first opponent, a second one appears. Then a third, then a fourth, and so on. Victory's only awarded when you make your way through every other competitor in the game all 40+ of them.