TNA iMPACT! 

Platform:  XBox 360, PlayStation 3, Wii, PlayStation 2 

Release Date:  September 9, 2008

I’ve always had a soft spot for professional wrestling games since the N64 days.  While I do own a couple of older titles, I feel the genre really took off in the late nineties, when the WCW and eventual WWF games would rule the circuit on the N64.  Lately, much like pro wrestling today, the Smackdown Vs. Raw series of games are all over the place, and Legends of Wrestlemania just came out.  However, TNA’s been busy with Midway Games, and surprisingly enough, they churned out a pretty darn good wrestling game, with TNA iMPACT!, which also came out on a bunch of systems.

Much like the game’s namesake, TNA iMPACT! attempts to bring something different to the table.  It does this by redefining the engine that originally got the genre on the map – the AKI based grappling engine on the N64 games.  Now, I’ve not really liked these titles past WCW/nWo Revenge, because the single player gets really tedious due to HORRENDOUSLY cheap AI.  It also has lousy flow compared to more recent games.  Thankfully, not only are there are couple of failsafes to get around it, but the gameplay is very fluid, with one move flowing to the next without fail.

Story mode in TNA iMPACT! revolves around a guy named Suicide, who was seemingly on top of the wrestling world with the world title.  Of course, this didn’t sit well with someone on the top brass, so of course he gets the crap beat out of him by LAX, and gets booted out and left for dead somewhere in Mexico.  This is the required Create-A-Wrestler mode of the game, where you create the character Suicide turns into, as he conveniently gets plastic surgery to save his life, as well as get amnesia to put him at the bottom of the ladder.  So of course, I created my good old mainstay, Carl Brutananadilewski.  Here I found that the CAW is extremely basic, and I wasn’t able to create Carl accurately.  Granted, it’s over nitpicks, like no green sandals and no gold chains, but the options would have been nice.  I also miss the sliders that Smackdown Vs. Raw has for finer control.  Overall, though, it’s a good start.  It’s also nice to see that you can make someone fat and they won’t have a six-pack.  The story mode itself reminds me of a more basic story mode from WWE Day of Reckoning, and you HAVE to win each match in order to progress.  There is no branching if you lose, you just rematch the same fight.

This is probably the best looking and best playing wrestling game I’ve ever gone through.  The motion capture and digital photographic technologies used to capture the likenesses and moves of the wrestlers are better than ANYTHING THQ and Yukes have put out.  It looks like Midway really put a lot of care into this game.  The engine doesn’t seem outdated at all, even though it reeks of AKI-ness.  It’s also much easier to pull overly crazy moves, like flying over the top rope onto the floor, or bouncing off the ropes and then colliding with the opponent, than the Smackdown Vs. Raw games.  “Simpler is better” seems to be the motto of this game when it comes to gameplay, and “details are better” comes in when it comes to the graphics and sound.

As great as this sounds, there are a few problems.  The No Mercy aneurysm train comes rushing back with cheap A.I.  However, it seems to get easily derailed by a hip toss, which seems to be the only unblockable move in the game.  Those with enough patience will be able to get through the story mode with no problems, just by hip tossing the computer until it gets stunned, then doing a power move to build up the Impact meter.  So it’s slightly broken that way, thus lending to the No Mercy heritage of being a better multiplayer game than single player.  In terms of presentation, I would have liked longer walks down the aisle and into the ring, instead of the short stints on the ramp.  The winning animations are all the same, so unfortunately it feels like the same guy wearing different skins.  While there are a bunch of match types including the Ultimate X match, there are certain types that are missing, including Six Sides of Steel, Elimination X, and Lethal Lockdown.  Despite having legitimate tag team members and tag team matches, teams do not come out together.  You only have five slots for CAW, so unfortunately there’s no chance of making a CAW league with this game.  There aren’t a whole lot of customization options in the CAW function, either.  There are no title belts in the game, so you can’t update the roster for the right people to have the belts.  And submission-based finishers are handled incorrectly.  The Scorpion Deathlock and Ankle Lock are not part of Sting’s or Kurt Angle’s moveset.  Yet Scott Steiner’s Steiner Recliner IS in the game, and it acts like a pin, not a submission.  This is kind of surprising, as the button sequencing mini-game for submissions is actually pretty good.

This is a very surprising first try for Midway.  After being bogged down with WWE games for the past several years without any competition, it’s nice to see something new.  I’m not saying the game is perfect – it’s far from it.  It’s definitely not a complete package compared to the WWE games, and the AI is either too cheap or too easy, depending on whether or not you know the trick to get around it.  However, it’s definitely pretty looking, and it’s the most fluid wrestling game I’ve ever played.  It’s too bad that Midway’s almost on its last legs, because a second try at this game could put it in contention with the status quo of Smackdown Vs. Raw.  I’ve crossed the line to TNA iMPACT!, and I found I don’t want to go back.