Wrestling Empire

Genre: Pro Wrestling

Players: 1-4 Competitive / Team Competitive (Local)

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Review:

Wrestling Empire, released on Nintendo Switch in 2021, is a Pro Wrestling game that is clearly trying to recapture the “golden age” of this genre of videogames, mimicking the look and style of classic N64 games like WWF No Mercy and WCW/nWo Revenge.

You might expect a game aiming to remind people of the Nintendo 64 days would look old-fashioned, but even so players might be taken aback at just how bad this game looks. Fairly low-poly character models with terrible animation, stands full of unmoving cardboard cutouts, tons of clipping, at times glitchy characters… if it wasn’t for the higher-resolution textures and overall higher resolution, this game would likely be considered ugly even if it were released on the Nintendo 64. At the very least, the menu music here is good, and the in-game sounds are okay, though they’re largely unspectacular and the game overall lacks polish.

The same is true of the gameplay, which seems really rough. Spotty hit detection, bad AI, and controls that don’t seem very responsive. I remember having a blast with some of the classic N64 wrestling games I mentioned above, and here the poor controls and overall bugginess of the game and its characters just makes it a lot harder to enjoy.

There is one other thing I should mention here. This game technically features no licensed wrestlers, but is full of suspiciously similar wrestlers that can easily be altered to make this an unofficial official collection of some of the greats of wrestling history, with tons of ways to change these pre-created characters. Unfortunately, there’s no actual create-a-wrestler mode.

Given what a terrible mess Pro Wrestling videogames have been in recent years, Wrestling Empire was pretty perfectly poised to be a solid low-budget blast to the past that could have reminded us about when this genre was still great. Instead, it’s an ugly, glitchy mess. I credit this game with what it attempts to do (even if it clearly tried to find loopholes around the fact that it didn’t have any licenses), but the result is a game that misses the mark.

tl;dr – Wrestling Empire is a Pro Wrestling game that evokes the N64 classics of the genre, but ugly visuals and buggy gameplay make this one fail to reach the height of those beloved classics.

Grade: D

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