RetroMania Wrestling Review (Nintendo Switch)
It feels like I start every review by saying a game is a ‘spiritual sequel’ of something, but this time we can go one better as Retromania Wrestling is an actual sequel to the 1991 arcade game WWF Wrestlefest.
Like its predecessor, Retromania Wrestling is a ‘pick up n play’ arcade button masher, despite the 20 year gap between the games they share similar 2D pixel art graphics and chip tune sounds tracks, with the main difference being the game is no longer under the WWE licence and features a roster of 16 well known independent wrestlers such as Stevie Richards, Tommy Dreamer and Nick Aldis
The game play is instantly accessible with 3 attack buttons, weak, medium and heavy, a health bar for each character and a momentum bar which fills following successful flurries of attacks allowing you to access the heavier attacks, and culminating in the ability to perform each characters unique finishing move once the bar is full.
The game offers 4 modes, story mode, 10 pounds of gold, retro rumble and vs mode
Story mode sees you take the role Johnny Retro on the road to recovery from injury. There are pixel art cut scenes to tell the story between matches and branching story paths based on ‘heel’ or ‘face’ choices you make during the cut scenes.
10 pounds of gold is your more traditional tournament fighter mode where you take on 5 consecutive matches in order to challenge for the belt, and on successfully capturing the title you defend the belt 5 more times before completing the game mode. A cool feature with this mode, whoever you completed the game with last will be champion the next time you play as a different character or even in other game modes.
Retro Rumble I’m sure most people are familiar with. Two men start, another comes in every 10 seconds until a total of 16 have entered and been eliminated leaving the last man standing the victor. This is definitely one of the more fun modes if not a little chaotic at times.
VS mode, as you would expect is a single match against a friend locally or the CPU where you get to choose from a selection of match types, rules and venues.
The game play in all modes is really satisfying. I definitely recommend Retro mania wrestling, the only two things I found disappointing was the length of the story mode and lack of online play.
The credits rolled on the story mode after about an hour of playtime at a point I genuinely thought was still the intro part of the story. Maybe I had overly ambitious hopes but I was expecting a 5-10 hrs story so it was quite jarring to finish it so quickly. I did note the “to be continued…” message at the end so I hope the developers patch in some more content as this was actually my favourite mode in the game. I just wanted more of it.
My other gripe is the lack of online play. More to my personal circumstances of living in another country away from many of my gaming friends, this would be an amazing game to play online together but as it stands I have to force my less than enthusiastic fiancé to couch co-op with me. I understand the size of the task to implement online play, but I really hope the developers are able to address this as I feel this games strongest draw is playing with friends which I’m unable to do, and I’m sure there are many others in similar situations to me.
In conclusion, I genuinely love Retromania Wrestling. It’s blown my mind for years why WWE have always chased the wrestling-sim market rather than the casual nature of the classic arcade games that everyone loved. This is exactly what I want in a wrestling game, a super fun, easy to learn action game with enough depth in the combat to keep it interesting. Developer Retrosoft have already laid out plans to support the game going forward with additional wrestlers in the form of paid DLC, so my hope is to see a continuation of the story mode and the addition of online play as my only complaint with the game was wanting more of the same.