Anyone who has watched WWE knows that things can get cartoonish real fast, even in the modern-day. Only a handful of video games have shunned the simulation side of sports games and embraced this off the wall atmosphere, and of those select few, the newly released WWE 2K Battlegrounds may unfortunately be the weakest. It's certainly more stable than last year's WWE 2K20, but it strays too far from what makes WWE action special to really leave an impact.
That's not to say that other arcade wrestling games have ported over every hurricanrana and rest hold. Releases like Midway's WrestleMania arcade game and THQ's WWE All Stars gave wrestlers generic strikes to lead up to their signatures and finishers. 2K and Saber Interactive take an unfortunate step further, slotting every WWE wrestler into one of five generic character classes. Not only does this lead to wrestlers performing maneuvers they've never done before, but it also means that the huge roster of playable wrestlers is meaningless. When the only difference between Hulk Hogan and Samoa Joe is a pair of animations that play at the end of a match, there's little reason to expand beyond a few favorite combatants.
Not that single players will be worrying about that. WWE 2K Battlegrounds' campaign is a series of matches introducing a sextet of custom characters. It serves as a tutorial to how each of the classes operates, but that doesn't make for an engaging series of matches. Unfortunately, players will need to go through over 100 of these matches to unlock a good majority of the game's initial playable roster. They'll also need to play to unlock in-game currency, which is used to secure everything from alternate costumes to character upgrades to another chunk of the game's wrestlers. Even at the best of times, the campaign can feel like a repetitive grind that's hard to get into.
This is a shame because the campaign also contains the best of WWE 2K Battlegrounds. Between each match, there are comic book cutscenes to read through that tell the story of Paul Heyman and Steve Austin building up an alternate WWE brand. This explains the off the wall arenas players fight in throughout the game, and the story beats show love for deep WWE history that rewards longtime fans. When an event from a twenty-year-old European exclusive pay-per-view can be casually thrown into dialogue, anything is on the table. The story bits really help keep momentum through the campaign, but they're missing from the side objectives that include unlockable characters, meaning that even the most engaged fan will still experience that grind.
In multiplayer, WWE 2K Battlegrounds does work out better, offering controls and gameplay that are easy to pick up for anyone that happens to pass by the TV. If this were an arcade cabinet, it would be a perfect setup. As a console game, the lack of depth is killer, and the modes seem to operate on an assumption that players will want to sink endless hours into the gameplay. Instead of moves, the focus is on selectable power-ups that light wrestler's fists on fire and arena interactions like throwing a wrestler under a car jack and crushing their head. These are novel the first few times, but they don't make up for a fighting system that feels clunky and generic.
If there was some sort of "unlock all" option for WWE 2K Battlegrounds that gave everything the game had to offer from the start, this might be an easy recommendation for wrestling fans looking for a multiplayer party game. Throwing wrestlers to alligators and electrified cage matches all have their fleeting charms, and a more fully-featured game could easily sneak into a rotation of favorites. As it stands, the implementation of grind and paid currency wring all the fun out of the experience, leaving a game with some potential that isn't worth the effort to see all the way through. Much like a modern-day RAW main event, the in-ring action is sound if not memorable, but it's the decisions behind the scenes that really ruin it for everyone.
WWE 2K Battlegrounds is available on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, PC, and Stadia. 2K provided an Xbox One copy of the game for the purposes of this review.
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