2/5 ★ – PhilMyth's review of WWE 2K Battlegrounds.

Originally written for Nintendo Village: https://www.thenintendovillage.com/articles/wwe-2k-battlegrounds-review *** Following in the footsteps of its NBA Playgrounds basketball counterpart, WWE 2K Battlegrounds aims to be a more accessible, arcade version of the mainline 2K wrestling sim. Its over-the-top nature certainly offers some easy thrills for all players, but it sacrifices any depth to do so, whilst the publisher’s trademark microtransactions sour the experience further. Wrestlemania Battlegrounds’ whole shtick is to take the traditionally reserved and understated world of pro wrestling (ahem), and dial it up to 11. Powerhouses launch opponents miles into the air, high-flyers can cover the entire ring in a single bound, and each arena features hazards that are comically violent. You can throw a foe into the waiting maw of an alligator in the everglades, or drop an entire car on them in Detroit. The game revels in the Saturday-morning-cartoon nature of its violence and is all the better for it. The first time I threw The Undertaker 12 feet in the air - following up with two, mid-air uppercuts - I couldn’t help but laugh at the ridiculousness of it all. On the surface, it’s all great fun. Beneath the surface you have 5 different classes to play as: Powerhouse, Brawler, Technician, High-flyer, and All-rounder. Each one gives you certain strengths and weaknesses. For example, High-Flyers can get to the top rope in a single bound, whereas it’s far easier to win by submission with Technicians. This sounds like it would add some depth to proceedings outside of the pick-up-and-play party-game nature of the initial experience. Unfortunately, truth be told, mashing the punch/kick buttons and following up with the odd grapple is enough to get the job done regardless of the scenario. Sadly, this shallow strategy for victory is the same not only across classes, but across the wrestlers themselves. Each superstar falls into one of the aforementioned classes, and their (disappointingly limited) moveset is determined largely by that class. There’s a little variation here and there in the finishers, but not enough to make things interesting. Meet Your Match The superficial variation applies to the match types too. By and large, they’re all win by pin/submission affairs (one on one, triple threat, fatal 4-way, gauntlet, tag-team and tornado tag) so the same mindless strategy can easily take you to victory. Royal Rumble does show up, and an electrified steel cage match adds a little variety to proceedings - even if it is exceptionally easy to escape. Bizarrely though, there’s no ladder match, no table match, or indeed, no TLC matches. Given the game is all about walloping your opponent with everything you can get your (occasionally flaming) hands on, it seems odd that wrestling’s most hardcore matches have been omitted. Outside of exhibition and multiplayer games, you’ll experience all of these matches in the game’s single player campaign. The setup being Paul Heyman and Stone Cold Steve Austin are on the hunt for unknown superstars in the making to wrestle in their new Battlegrounds franchise. This means you play through the 7 chapter campaign as one of 7 original creations. In fairness, they all have unique personalities (the Florida gator wrestler being my favourite), though it was initially disappointing not to play through the campaign as a superstar I’d created myself. As you progress you can unlock a selection of items for the create a wrestler and create an arena modes, as well as arenas and more superstars. Unfortunately though, not all of them. Money In The Bank WWE 2K Battlegrounds does feature a pretty impressive roster all in all, with 70 Superstars from multiple eras and generations within the game. Unfortunately there’s only 20 of them available from the get-go and the rest have to be unlocked. That wouldn’t be too much of an issue, apart from the fact it’s such a massive grind to do so. Playing through every encounter in the main game will give you another eight (though you’ll have to go hunting for them, not every match is necessary to see the credits), and the rest are unlocked in the store. Here you can exchange Battlebucks earned in-game for the likes of Triple H and Andre the Giant. Each match during the campaign will earn you around 300, but you’re looking at up to 12,000 for someone like Brock Lesnar or AJ Styles. This is compounded by the fact that if you’re not connected to the internet, there’s no Battlebucks reward for you when the bell rings. You can get around this by paying real-world cash for gold coins to buy superstars with instead of course, but to unlock every wrestler and all of their alternate outfits you could buy the game four times over and come away with change. The fact that this currency is also used to improve the skill tree of your own created superstars just adds insult to injury, especially considering how limited the character creator is in the first place. VERDICT At its core, there’s a really fun arcade brawler within WWE 2K Battlegrounds. Everything just feels a little half-arsed. The class system could work great if the movesets were fleshed out and varied, and the ridiculousness would be even more entertaining across more match types. Unfortunately, as it stands, the game - despite some multiplayer fun - gets repetitive very quickly and thus leaves you with little desire to put in the hours needed to avoid the plethora of microtransactions.