TNA iMPACT!

The story of this game begins with you as the masked wrestler "Suicide." With confetti dropping from the ceiling and fans chanting your name, you are on top of the world as you hold the TNA World Championship above your head in celebration. This celebration would not last long however, as the tag team of Homicide (yup they have wrestlers named both Homicide and Suicide) and Hernandez, known collectively as the Latin American Exchange (LAX), beats you down in the parking lot as you are leaving the arena after what is arguably the greatest day of your life. When you finally come to, you find yourself in a hospital bed. Your red and blue mask has been replaced with a mask of bandages and a body cast to match. The doctor explains to you that you have been beaten so badly that he must perform plastic surgery to restore your looks. However, knowing that you have always been self conscious about your big nose and love handles, he gives you the option of a whole new look (I can't help but think that the story developers got their inspiration from Face/Off). From here, you as the player are forced to create your own wrestler to compete. This premise sounds somewhat interesting (albeit ridiculous), but really loses a lot of steam when you realize that the create-a-wrestler is less in depth than the create-a-wrestlers of games from a decade ago like Wrestlemania 2000. Upon completion, I was left with a tattooed black man in purple tights, Ugg boots with tassels, and a white mask. He was an uninspired creation, but then again, so was this entire game.

From there, you fight your way back to the ranks of TNA in hopes of one day discovering who hired LAX to beat you down. To accomplish this, you wrestle all over the world (and by all over I mean Japan and Mexico and a random armory) in an attempt to be noticed by the TNA brass. After about 50 or so unbearable matches, this story culminates with you facing off with the true mastermind of your beat down in one of the most unfair boss battles I have ever come across.

Let's get the positive out of the way. This game has serviceable graphics. Okay I'm glad that's over. Let's get to the negative.

This game has a broken control scheme. The B button is responsible for climbing the turnbuckle, leaving the ring, picking up weapons, pinning your opponent, and pretty much every other non-strike action of which you could possibly think. That, in itself, would not be a huge issue if the direction you pushed while pressing B had any effect. For instance, if I pressed B, but was aiming the joystick towards the turnbuckle, I would expect to climb it. However, because the direction I press is not a factor, the game might just randomly decide that I would rather pin my opponent (despite being much closer to the turnbuckle than my downed opponent). This led to a lot of screaming and swearing on my part. No matter how hard I tried, I could never get my wrestler to do what I wanted him to do. This may not seem like a big deal, but in a lot of instances this game felt almost unplayable.

Also, instead of creating AI that would result in interesting and challenging matches as you progress through the Mexican jobbers to the TNA superstars, the developers decided that they would just make the TNA superstars do about five times as much damage as your wrestler (that's an average - Jeff Jarrett could beat me in about 6 moves). This would be okay if there was any way to improve the stats of your wrestler to be on par with Kurt Angle or AJ Styles. Instead, you are stuck with developing cheap strategies of spamming one or two moves so the AI opponent can never touch you. Because, let me assure you, if your opponent ever gets a move off, you are going to lose. As a result, when I wasn't restarting the match due to a loss (I lost more than I won while playing on easy), I was spending the entirety of my career doing cross body blocks and diving elbow drops.

Speaking of problems with the AI, if you run around the ring, your opponent will always follow. Because of that, if you run close enough to the steel ring steps, the AI is too stupid to avoid them and will trip every time. This represents the most satisfying aspect of the entire game.

Oh and this game has such a thin roster (about 20 wrestlers) that the majority of my career was spent fighting randomly generated wrestlers. I shouldn't complain too much about this because it did result in my fighting some jean-clad gems like "Beardy McGee" and "The Bulgarian."

However, when all is said and done, Beardy just wasn't enough to make up for this lazy attempt at a wrestling game. I want the 8 hours of my life back I spent on this garbage. Fuck you Midway. Fuck you TNA, fuck you.