Rating

B-

Specific Ratings

GraphicsB+
SoundB
GameplayB-
Replay ValueB+
Learning CurveC

Pros and Cons

Pros
  • Graphics are generally really good
  • Nothing is entirely broken
  • Entrance themes sound good
  • Universe Mode is awesome
  • Can make Zack Ryder champion of everything ever
Cons
  • Animations are always "not quite right"
  • TONS of manual updates to do out of the box
  • Road to Wrestlemania is terrible
  • Attires/appearances/morphs are generally off
  • Controls can be a burden

WWE '12 (Xbox 360)

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Summary

Not the game it should have been.

Images


Description

We all know what to expect from a THQ-made WWE game. It's almost a checklist of things to go down and check the same ones each and every single year. The checklist is as follows EVERY YEAR: Improved character models, better overall graphics, an outdated-upon-release roster, kind-of-updated entrance themes, a refined CAW mode, updated-yet-still-average commentary, bad movesets for everyone, a distinctly horrible online experience for at least two months after release, new animations look worse than the old ones and the same exact grunts, groans, and grimaces from years past. WWE '12 accomplished all of these and more, while remaining distinctly NOT a wrestling sim.

So in the spirit of the game and its checklist, let's go through them all one at a time.

This game does have decidedly improved character models. John Cena looks like John Cena. Randy Orton looks like Randy Orton. The Undertaker looks like the Undertaker until the brutal hair (which has been an issue since the very first Smackdown back in 2000!) moves. Edge does not look like Edge all that much, but more a decidedly un-hairy ape with blond hair on his chin. Alberto Del Rio looks like he's constipated. Daniel Bryan looks like, well, crap. Triple H still looks WAY too buff. This is how THQ/Yukes rolls. They go up and down the list of guys that they want in the game. WWE OKs this list, or makes changes accordingly. Eventually they get a down-pat roster of guys that are going to be in the year's game. The higher up the card you go, the more detail and effort and thought goes into the characters. John Cena looks almost perfect. Dolph Ziggler, not so much. Randy Orton looks fine, Justin Gabriel does not. The worst thing about this is the Legends they decided to put in the game. The roster of Legends is amazing until you get to looking at them. I'm not being racist here, but Booker T is a whole lot darker in real life than he is in WWE '12. Just being factual. Arn Anderson looks way more physically imposing in this game than he ever did for real, Steve Austin looks like an oiled up bald baboon, the Rock looks the worst he's looked since Smackdown! Here Comes the Pain, Vader looks stupid and Shawn Michaels... the disservice they did to Shawn Michaels. They released him looking as if they plastered his 2010 face on a 1997 Shawn Michaels tights skin with a 2010 Shawn Michaels body proportions. Maybe its because he's DLC, but still... that's absolute garbage and it should not be acceptable. Ricky Steamboat is one of the greatest wrestlers of all time but he looks like he was molded out of one of those mid-80's WWF all-rubber action figures. Most of the game's wrestlers look like that, but Steamboat was taken to an extreme. All this said, it's a noticeable improvement over the models of the past. The game does look impressive, and the graphics are a notch above the predecessors.

The roster is, as always, outdated upon release. It never ceases, and it did not this year. Maryse is in the game and she was gone before it was released. Chavo Guerrero suffered the same fate. Michelle McCool, same thing. John Morrison was done with WWE a week after the game's release. Vladmir Koslov doesn't work there anymore. Husky Harris is back in FCW, WWE's farm league and FCW is actually part of WWE '12 if you play Universe mode. None of what I've just said accounts for the updates and tweaks to a lot of wrestlers' current looks and alliances and whether they're "face" (good guy) or "heel" (bad guy) or whatever, because a lot of those need to be changed too. Also a lot of attires that the wrestlers wear are outdated or the wrong colors or are just plain wrong, so those obviously weren't part of THQ's overall update.

When I have to update 14 entrance music themes on the day of release, there's an issue. I understand copyright issues and all that, but I'm not talking about copyrighted music, like when Undertaker came out to Johnny Cash for Wrestlemania 27 against Triple H. I'm talking about WWE-produced music. No excuse for this. There should be no reason that anyone has to update theme music for wrestlers upon release of the game. This should be one of the last things to be put into the game, to ensure the closest-to-release themes as humanly possible.

Commentary's still average (barely) and even in a video game, Michael Cole is terrible. He's awful. THQ decided to take the storylines he was putting over earlier in 2011 and have him record lines about them, and then in the same match he'll talk the opposite of what he said a second ago. It's not uncommon for him to talk about how much he dislikes Daniel Bryan yet in the next thing he says he'll be talking about how great the guy is. He'll talk about how great the Miz is then he'll bury him in commentary. Jerry Lawler, on the other hand, is way better at commentary on WWE '12 than he is on Monday Night RAW, actively making comparisons between guys and what works best when. So THQ scripted Cole worse and Lawler way better.

Create a Wrestler mode is refined, and it's better than the year before. But not by much at all. It's the yearly CAW update. Moving along...

The move lists they have for wrestlers is just terrible. There's no way that they should have guys that have never done a dropkick in their lives do one. There's no way they should have made Big Show a technical decimator in the same vein as Daniel Bryan. But they did because they can't (or won't) decide who should have what moves accurately. Everyone can systematically take apart anyone else part by part. It's almost like they decide to get the signatures right (most of the time, anyways) and get the finishers right and then whatever. For a yearly game, they should be able to update a hell of a lot more than they actually do. I understand accounting for some time between finalizing updates and the actual disc-based release, but THQ takes lazy updates to a whole new level.

The online aspect of WWE '12 seems to be the one thing THQ makes a disaster of every year, and this is no exception. It's about on par with 2K Sports when they release a new NBA 2K game and the online's broken, laggy (if you can get in), and just plain bad. WWE '12 is no different. They've allowed dedicated Create-a-whatever makers to upload their creations onto Xbox Live/Playstation Network for download and/or ratings. It was royally bad this year, with everyone getting disconnected all the time and nothing working well. THQ has been updating things the whole time and working on fixes and as of right now (1/19/2012) it's not perfect but it's way better than at launch.

Animations for moves are as tight as can reasonably be expected these days. THQ has motion capture people do all the moves, and they've claimed to have some wrestlers come in and motion-capture their own moves, such as Evan Bourne. There's no reason to believe otherwise, but there's no way that all the wrestlers in the game came in and motion-captured all their big moves. The Attitude Adjustment doesn't look like the one John Cena would do. The Rough Ryder looks like the one Zack did to Michael Cole on RAW in July. The Pedigree and Stone Cold Stunner both look like crap. I can appreciate the motion-capture peoples' attempts to make things look good, but it just didn't work. If they're going to do anything, they should make moves like the Pedigree look more devastating, not less.

The gameplay in WWE '12 is more or less exactly the same as in SVR 2010, and 2009, and before, but with less moves at your disposal in one situation and more in another. That's not to say it's bad, because the gameplay is good, but the tweaks are generally not overly noticeable and it's well worn out. Instead of having a different grapple move for each direction+grapple (for example, if you've got the guy in the corner), there are only two. One with a direction press and one without. With front grapples, the direction you press determines which grapple you use to set up your opponent (though you can switch which one in the grapple) and you've got a move for each direction+grapple input you use. Controls are a little sloppy, though. There are things you mean to do and you do something else, or just find something out of the blue. The instruction manual, if you can call it that, is a pamphlet with the (incomplete) ways to do things in the game. There's no way to change the controls to your liking, you just kind of have to get used to it. That's never a good thing in a wrestling game.

So theoretically you've got 16 moves out of a front grapple if you can get ahold of your opponent. The reversal system is one button this year, and the CPU loves to reverse the hell out of you. It'll reverse about everything on Legendary difficulty, and way more than it should on the Normal difficulty. Thankfully there are sliders for this kind of thing as it should be toned down. I appreciate a spike in difficulty in my wrestling games but it's almost as if they're all covered in super-slippery baby oil or something.

New to WWE '12 this year is the "Predator Technology" which is supposed to make things more fluid than in years past. It kind of works, kind of doesn't. Not a ton more fluid than before but some things are noticeable.

In the WWE world, Vince McMahon controls everything. He controls who goes out when, who beats who, what their main moves are, their attitude, what they say, everything. This is, of course, bleeding over into the video games. Not Vince himself specifically, but the "We know what you want better than you know what you want" mentality. This is no more apparent than in the game's Road to Wrestlemania mode. In this mode, you start out as the "villain" Sheamus (who is now in real life a "face") and then once his storyline is over you're Triple H (whose storyline intertwines with Sheamus' in the beginning) and then once you're done playing as him you become "Jacob Cass" (a CAW you'll make in the story mode, voiced by TNA's Austin Aries who did this before signing on with the number two wrestling company in the United States). The storylines are at least overseen by WWE Creative, or at least they have to be because quite frankly, they're bad. No spoilers on the storylines or anything, but they could have been a hell of a lot better.

In wrestling, storylines are not traditionally things where one person wins all the time and the other loses. Usually to make them more dramatic, they share wins and losses, trials and tribulations, and highs and lows until they reach a final climax and one wins. In WWE '12 this is no different, but the writing's terrible. More often than not you go out there as your character, whoever it may be, and wrestle (or fight backstage) and once you've got your opponent weakened sufficiently you press Y and go to a cutscene where you're either going to come out the better or (usually) going to get screwed. It would have been appreciated more if you didn't have to press Y to get screwed, as it feels that you did all this work and put all this time into getting past it only to get screwed out of it and have to do it again and get screwed again and again until the end when I finally win. By the time they get to the "big win" I've skipped every cutscene possible because I don't care. It's a burden of a mode and something gamers won't come back to play again.

The biggest and best mode in WWE '12, though, is Universe mode. This mode of play is simply amazing and shouldn't be overlooked because it's so encompassing. It's engrossing. Basically you play every single match that would happen on RAW and Smackdown! and Superstars and whichever the monthly PPV is. The game will create the storylines if you don't want to, it'll set up matches you can switch on the fly, it'll simulate as much or as little as you want. Want to make Zack Ryder WWE Champion (#WWWYKI!)? Do it. Want to make Triple H a peon who loses alot? Go for it. Want to bring Demolition and the Road Warriors back to active WWE competition? Feel free. The sky and imagination are the limit here. This is the saving grace of WWE '12 as far as modes are concerned because exhibitions can get old even with the match types and Road to Wrestlemania sucks. Move wrestlers from one brand to another, affect who they're aligned with and who their rivals are, make them "face" or "heel"... the changes you make here except for Championship belts affect Exhibition modes. So if you make CM Punk's crowd reaction "boo" then the crowd will boo him in exhibition as well. Be warned though, as the Universe mode will have wrestlers turn on its' own if you let them, so if you go into exhibition and see Rey Mysterio get booed, there's why.

Overall WWE '12 is a mixed bag. It's close, but I would say there is more good than bad, but there's more than a small feeling of "been there, done that." The gameplay's good but largely unchanged. Graphics and sound are a little better but again, largely unchanged. Predator Technology makes things a little more fluid, but AGAIN, largely unchanged. The create modes are back and better but YET AGAIN, largely unchanged. Road to Wrestlemania is back and it sucks. Universe is where it's at for this game, and I think THQ knows it. Overall this is not a game to spend full price on, but around $30 or $40 is good if you've spent a year or two away from the WWE games. Besides... you can make Zack Ryder the champion of everything and who wouldn't want to do that?

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