by Vinson Chen

Created on: July 22, 2010

WWF Road to WrestleMania is a wrestling game developed by THQ in 2001 for the Game Boy Advance. It is based off of the pay-per-view television show by the World Wrestling Federation, but unlike the action packed acting wrestlers on television, WWF Road to WrestleMania is bland. The game is full of redundancy. There is repetition in the characters available for wrestling, the wrestling moves, and the view of the wrestling arena. This heavy aura of dullness repels the gamer away from long sessions of gaming with WWF Road to WrestleMania. Even short sessions are hardly bearable. This game is worth approximately $10, but it is a miracle that it can be sold at all. 

An interesting to note about WWF Road to WrestleMania is that it actually has twenty four different playable wrestlers. They range from Billy Gunn to D-Von Dudley to Jeff Hardy to Rikishi and even to X-Pac. Unfortunately, each wrestler is exactly the same as the next in the line of wrestlers in the Game Boy Advance video game. They all perform the exact same moves and they all have the same strengths as the next. Even though the game states the difference in weight between the wrestlers (each being over two hundred pounds each), they still wrestle the exact same way. They only have different pixelated graphical designs. In all other aspects they are the same, so this is the first reason that WWF Road to WrestleMania is repetitive.

Secondly, the wrestling maneuvers that each wrestler performs are hardly interesting themselves. It seems that the game wants the player to button mash into victory because there seems to be no real way to make an interesting combo. A grabs the opponent, B kicks them in the crotch, and R rushes the wrestler into the opponent. After grabbing an opponent, the gamer has to button mash a little bit and hope that something interesting will happen. Most of the time nothing does. It is a lot simpler just to spam the B button and continuously slam the opponent's gonads to death. There appears to be a glitch in the game in which a lot of kicking traps the opponent and refrains them from moving. This leaves them wide open to a good ball pummeling, but that produces no delight or fun. It is just too repetitive for any gamer's taste. 

Finally, the setting itself is a side-view of a wrestling arena. This provides for limited mobility although the wrestler can move up or down a little bit. Anyways, once again a supposedly action packed video game for the Game Boy Advance falls very short in its attempt to mooch off of a prestigious television show. No surprise that it is a failure.

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