WrestleQuest preview: out-working everyone
If there’s one thing that modern triple-A wrestling games consistently fail at, it’s story modes. Both WWE 2K23 and AEW Fight Forever’s stories are repetitive slogs with very little of what makes wrestling narratives entertaining. That makes a wrestling RPG a mouthwatering prospect, and finally, someone stepped up to the plate and made one.
WrestleQuest is set in a toybox land of wrestling stereotypes and parodies, where Macho Man Randy Savage is some sort of god, with massive visages of him in every major city – yet there’s a disappointing lack of Slim Jims. You see instantly that this is a game made by people who love wrestling, they understand its inherent silliness and know how to exploit it for comedic effect.
Skybound Games
They even come up with a creative solution to the biggest problem with the concept. If you’ve ever seen a movie about wrestling, you’ll know they often can’t decide whether the sport is real fighting or scripted combat in their universe, so they end up going half-and-half. WrestleQuest turns even that into a plot point as while most wrestlers talk openly about writers and scripts, our man-child of a protagonist remains blissfully ignorant to it all and has these fights for real.
While I only saw the beginning of this story, this grounded tale is a good way to frame all of the outlandish fantasy aspects of this world. This is a world with gang wars between wind-up rat toys and discount Mr Potato Heads, and yet the real-life wrestling stars of the 90s slot perfectly into it.
Unlike now where characters and stories are more realistic, all the real wrestlers in this game are from the era when bigger was better and absolutely everything was as over-the-top as it could be. It didn’t matter what you said in your promos as long as you said it loud enough. You can run into “Nasty Boy” Brian Knobs in the rundown streets and he doesn’t seem out of place – just don’t tell him I said that.
Skybound Games
The ‘worked’ element of wrestling is incorporated into the gameplay well too. While you have all your standard RPG stuff like stats, gear, and items, you also have to be constantly tracking the crowd’s hype levels. You can win a match, but if the crowd thought it sucked then you won’t get very good rewards, and you’ll experience debuffs as the battle goes on.
What’s great about the system is that to build hype, you often have to forgo attacking. You can “taunt” on your turn to quickly build hype, but not only will that take your whole turn, but your defense will be cut in half. It greatly expands the turn-to-turn decision-making of each match, forcing you to take hits for the sake of making the bout more entertaining for the fans – and suddenly you realize you’re working a match just like real wrestlers do.
Skybound Games
That said, this only applies to the boss encounters, which is the only time the game gets properly challenging. Like any good turn-based RPG, you’ll face a bunch of random encounters along the way, but they’re all pretty easy, and you’ll quickly get a bit bored of them. The combat system really shines in those tough fights, but its flaws are exposed when you can just spam the basic attack over and over to win most bouts.
There’s still more to see in WrestleQuest though, I may have breezed through the early-game areas, but the scope is there for things to get a lot tougher later down the line with great enemy variety and a bunch of different damage types, status effects, and all that good stuff – whether or not WrestleQuest is the kind of game willing to go down that route, I don’t yet know.
What I do know is that WrestleQuest is a game made by wrestling fans. If you’re a fan, you’ll likely love it too. The more you know about the history and inner workings of the business, the more you’ll get out of the comedy, narrative, and gameplay. Even if the full game’s combat doesn’t live up to its potential, it’s a game I’m simply happy exists.
