WWE 2K20, which had the misfortune to be born last year and buried the remnants of respect for the series, still made publisher 2K stop wiping tears with fan money after reading devastating reviews on Metacritic.
The change from a brutal atmosphere to a more comical one, no doubt, added the long-awaited freshness and variety, but when you get to know WWE 2K Battlegrounds closely, you get a strong feeling that you are playing a version of some kind of free-to-play wrestling for mobile platforms. In fact, the differences from the same WWE Mayhem for Android offhand turned out to be not so much.
The funny thing is that in some aspects, Battlegrounds is even inferior to its mobile counterparts. For example, the elderly WWE Supercar from mobile phones immediately makes a novelty in terms of the number of modes (even if they are all different variations of the game of cards): here you have Ring Domination.
and Elimination Chamber, and Royal Rumble, and Money in the Bank, and more classic modes . Battlegrounds, on the other hand, seems to be afraid of its own fantasies and frivolity, limiting itself only to the eccentric visual style of the characters and cartoonish arenas where you can, for example, throw your opponent into the mouth of a crocodile.
In the transition to cartooning, the “career” mode was put under the knife. Not quite, of course, but if earlier he was simply extremely sterile, now it is a completely shamelessly castrated “grid” of various matches and awards.
created purely for the monotonous plotless pumping of his manual fighter. As if realizing the inferiority of this mode, Saber Interactive studio rolled out an additional campaign. However, the promotional portion of the content turned out to be another hack – watching unknown low-carders through the prism of hastily written comics is simply boring.
Gameplay here WWE Battlegrounds strives to keep up with its older counterparts of past years … for some reason. It would seem that this was the place for arcade and unbridled fun in non-stop mode. But no, after every second hit, the protein jocks struggle with the stars above their heads for three or four seconds.
forcing them to hammer on the buttons no longer for the sake of raising the character to their feet, but for the sake of at least some dynamics appearing on the screen. And here you already have four scales per hero: health, fatigue, activation of power-ups and crowd support for signature moves, and the latter is completely unfriendly with logic.
The love of the audience is earned by indulging it – that is, by performing the techniques it needs. And no matter how you diversify your match with various tricks and throws.
if the local redneck wants an insipid combo of three punches, the player will receive the most people’s love for this banality. Otherwise, everything is standard: beat half to death, go to painful or hold, learn to counterattack on prompts that disappear in a split second and quickly hammer on the keys. Places for balance and tactics, it seems, were not found here at all, only reflexes decide.
But for those who yearn a little for Titans of Wrestling on TNT, or who have periodically joined 2×2 episodes of SmackDown in the company of two divine commentators, 2K and Saber Interactive have tons of fan service to offer. Brock Lesner still enters the ring under the Next Big Thing and practices F-5 on everyone he meets.
and Daniel Bryan sticks his fingers up, shouts the signature “Yes!” There was also a place on the roster for veterans of the industry since the days of the WWF, but for some reason many of them were “rated” below the youngsters: with all due respect to AJ Styles and Roman Reigns, they are still not a match for Andre the Giant or Shawn Michaels in in terms of legend.
But be that as it may, the horse-sized roster begins to become frustratingly fast: apart from unique tricks and entrances to the arena, the characters really have nothing to offer. In some arcade WrestleMania for a 16-bit Sega Mega Drive, where the characters could be counted on the fingers, the difference in playing, say, for The Undertaker and Bret Hart was felt many times stronger.
However, fan service has not been without a fly in the ointment in the form of beloved 2K microtransactions – although who is surprised? Yes, technically it is not necessary to buy anything for real money, you can farm resources for new skins, fighters, animations through the gameplay, but when it comes to the realization that in three or four hours of playing you have accumulated currencies to buy one or two emotions for your character, it gets a little sad.
Similar feelings, however, overcome in general after a few hours of play. WWE 2K Battlegrounds, while not looking like the annually reanimated corpse of “realistic” wrestling, is an utterly secondary product. It would seem that for so many years it was possible to create, for example, a normal generator of random events, bringing the staged fight simulator closer to a real television show with its betrayals, love dramas, intrigues, biased judges and executive directors. But 2K again
