WWE Legends of Wrestlemania

THQ and Jukes are back again, this time bringing some of the WWE's best ever superstars back to the ring so that you can "relive, rewrite and redefine" some of the greatest moments in wrestling history. Growing up watching the golden era of wrestling when I was a kid, this game is like a dream come true.

THE GOOD
- Very realistic graphics - all of the wrestlers look extremely life-like and you can even see the sweat as the matches go on! All of the Wrestlemania arenas are there too from WM 1-15 including Caesar's Place, Trump Plaza, the Silverdome and Madison Square Garden.
- A really good roster of superstars including favourites like Hulk Hogan, The Rock, Shawn Michaels, Ric Flair, The Undertaker, Jake the Snake Roberts, Andre the Giant, Big John Studd, Yokozuna, Legion of Doom, Bret Hitman Hart, Stone Cold Steve Austin, The Ultimate Warrior, Rowdy Roddy Piper and Hunter Hearst Healmsley as well as some surprises like Hacksaw Jim Duggan, Kamala, Bam Bam Bigelow, Dusty Rhodes, Brutus the Barber Beefcake, The Big Boss Man and Mr Perfect.
- The connectivity to Smackdown vs Raw 2009 is pretty cool as it increases the roster by double.
- Plenty of game modes to choose from including one-on-one, tag team, Royal Rumble, Hell in a Cell, Cage, Ladder, Battle Royale and a few others as well as the one player Legend Killer mode where you create a wrestler and then try to beat the legends. Also the Wrestlemania mode where you replay classic matches.
- The video intros are brilliant, giving the history of the classic matches and also shows you what happened (I also forgot how funny Bobby Heenan was!) Perfect for fans from back in the 80s and 90s - it bought back a lot of memories! The presentation, including the original graphics used for the real-life Wrestlemanias is also excellent.
- Very easy to just pick up and play with a great learning curve and online mode is really good fun.
- It features all of the entrances and original music.

THE BAD
- So many classic superstars are missing! Where's Macho Man Randy Savage, Demolition, Mick Foley/Mankind, Diesel, Razor Ramon, Earthquake, Lex Luger, The Nasty Boys, Akeem, Tatanka, Rick Martell, Tito Santana, Owen Hart, Marty Jeanetty, Doink, The Barbarian, Haku, IRS, The Big Show and Ricky the Dragon Steamboat!?
- There's quite a few wrestlers like Arn Anderson and Michael Hayes for example which I can never really remember as being legends in the WWE (maybe in WCW)..
- The controls aren't great - they should have stuck to the Smackdown vs Raw controls rather than the old school button bashing that is here, as I felt like a lot of the moves you pull off are quite random.
- It is stupidly easy on one player - I flew through Wrestlemania mode on Normal difficulty in no time. Nearly any pin will be successful.
- Some of the entrance music is the newer music and not from the era, like The Big Boss Man and Bam Bam Bigelow.

It seems that there are as many good points as there are bad, so this does summarise this game as pretty average unfortunately, especially for fans from this era like me who perhaps expected a little more from this as it had the potential to be the perfect wrestling game. I actually think that the Showdown: Legends of Wrestling game on the PS2 was a lot better than this in all honesty as although it didn't have the WWE/WWF branding on it, it did have about 40 more wrestlers on the roster and was a bit more fun.

Overall it is a fun to play game with the best presentation I've seen in a wrestling game, but has way too many flaws to be perfect. Worth try if you used to watch WWF in the 80s and 90s but expect to feel slightly underwhelmed on the whole. And that's the bottom line, because KM said so!

Being a child of the 90's when wrestling was real and only available on Sky one and pay per view in the early hours of the morning, this really shouted out to me. If you are like me and the previews of all the `legends' on offer here brought your childhood memories flooding back then you may buy this despite what the reviews say. The reason I mention this is because it hasn't had the best of ratings from what I have read, but I wouldn't accept them. Surely it was going to be brilliant right? Well the answer is no. As much as it pains me to say it, the game just doesn't feel like you're part of it.

First things first though, the graphics, movement, wrestler theme music and sound is all 1st class, you couldn't ask for more. The wrestlers do their individual ring dance, move the same and even taunt like the real guys, the clips of old matches are all spot on, its great. But then you try to play.
I lined myself straight in for a Royal Rumble, my fave as a kid, and plonked myself in at No 1 expecting the ring to fill up quickly with 30 of my heroes from the past. I flew in as the Ultimate Warrior, sprinting into the ring like a speed junky after a litre of full fat coca cola and bag of Star mix, then after five minutes I soon realised that despite all the buttons on your control pad, only the four main ones do anything?!?

Fight Night for example utilises all buttons to allow you to control your fighter to huge degree, in WWF, your meathead can only do a knife edge slap, or if you hold `strike' down for longer, a punch. OK so a few kicks come in to play here or there but that's really it, and you're not in control of what he does. After a few hours it became clear that this is a button masher that just looks pretty.
Another thing that annoys is there are so many camera-cut-aways from what you're up to it becomes distracting. During the Royal Rumble when you're busy knife edging someone, every time a new wrestler comes in, the camera cuts to him coming down the isle. Not only that, when someone is hanging on after being thrown over the ropes, it cuts away to that too. All the while you've barely delivered an Irish whip! It's just not fluent enough.
To top off the royal Rumble disappointment, it only allows 6 men in at once, presumably so you can actually see what is going on because these guys are huge, and the ring is small. Boo. -Obviously that and if there were any more guys, there wouldn't be enough time to watch all those annoying cut-aways.

Shame really, thinking of what could have been, I suppose for a decent ring war, I'll wait for Fight Night 4, otherwise if you're after nostalgia, I would get an old classic Wrestlemania DVD to watch, and leave this alone.

My 2 son's are very into WWE and TNA wrestling and love this game as it combines all the wrestlers in one game and you can play matches as well as storys that lead up to wrestlemania