Features and Modes
As far as features and modes go, WrestleMania 21 has everything pretty much covered. You can play in Hell in a Cell, TLC, ladder, cage, fatal four way, triple threat, Royal Rumbles, and much more and they are all just like you would expect them to be. Only, you know, not good thanks to the pile of problems with the gameplay. Another annoyance is that you can only have up to 4 people in a match. Again, bad times if you are used to playing Smackdown. The career mode requires you to create a wrestler and then play through one year of WWE programming as you move from a jobber on Velocity to a main eventer at WrestleMania. It only follows one path, however, and is heavily scripted (your character is a total jerk at the beginning) so it won’t really keep you busy for long. The story is good, but only worth seeing once.The main attraction in WrestleMania 21 is the online play that allows you to play any match (except the Royal Rumble) against anyone in the world. You can also make your own titles and defend them. The experience is pretty laggy, though, and not all that much fun to play thanks to the cruddy wrestling engine.
Roster and CAW
What compounds the roster problem even more is that the create-a-wrestler (CAW) is extremely limited. There are only a handful of parts available for each area and for the first time in about four years I actually struggled to make a perfect copy of myself in a wrestling game. The interface for the CAW is also pretty clunky because you actually have to equip parts to see them on your character, so this means lots of going back and forth between menus which is tedious and slow. The CAW should be the main attraction in this game since it has Xbox Live play, but instead it feels more like an afterthought.
Graphics and Sound
Grapically, WM21 is stunning. This is the one area of the game that doesn’t completely suck, but as we all know graphics aren’t everything. The animation is a little stiff and wooden and characters do tend to teleport around the ring, but the character models themselves are some of the best yet in a wrestling title. Up close the wrestlers look a little too shiny and a bit like plastic, but when the camera pans out or during entrances this game is startlingly realistic looking.The sound is equal parts good, bad, and ugly. The good is that all of the WWE superstars contributed voice work for the career mode and it actually sounds really good. The bad is that the music is the exact same tracks that were used in Day of Reckoning and Smackdown vs. Raw. Luckily, you can use your own music. Also, the sound effects are different from the past but they are none too good. And the ugly part of the sound in WM21 is that the game seemingly becomes overloaded and sounds cancel each other out with a burst of static and a “pffft” sound. It is certainly funny when every new entry in the Royal Rumble is announced with a loud “pfffft” sound, but this is just another stupid bug that shouldn’t have made it into the final $50 product.
Bottom Line
Overall, WrestleMania 21 is a major disappointment. It looks pretty, but it is filled with bugs and glitches and the core gameplay just isn’t all that fun compared to the wrestling titles available for other systems. The Xbox is definitely getting the short end of the stick when it comes to WWE games. Long load times, random crashes, teleporting wrestlers, sound glitches, collision detection problems … the list just goes on and on. This is a game that is only seemingly halfway completed and is not worth your time or your $50. Rent it if you are desperate for an Xbox wrestling title, but please don’t buy it and reward THQ for rushing a game out to stores that isn’t even close to being done.
