TNA iMPACT! (Xbox 360)

A hyper-violent ballet.
9/16/2008 6:35 PM | 0 Comments | Page 1 of 3

For the past eight years, THQ has maintained a submission hold on the wrestling game market with its popular WWE games. After a virtually unopposed reign as champ, a new face enters the ring hoping for a shot at the title. Do the TNA superstars and Midway have what it takes to pin the THQ/WWE juggernaut, or will TNA iMPACT! take a chair shot to the head?

While it's not exactly fair to put Midway's wrestling debut head -to-head against THQ's powerhouse franchise, the matchup has a lot of similarities with the ratings battle between TNA and the WWE. In both cases, TNA challenges the status quo with a fresh take on how to play the game. Like the six-sided ring and Ultimate X matches that were designed to make TNA stand out, Midway's game has a few new tricks of its own to make its name in the wresting game genre. And just like the TNA franchise, things may not be perfect, but they're off to a good start.

The Midway team has put together some of the best visuals seen in a wrestling game to date. Using the Havok Physics engine together with Unreal Engine 3, the developers have made the wrestlers in TNA iMPACT! look and feel virtually identical to their real-life counterparts. The characters don't have that shiny action-figure look that's plagued the WWE games for years, and you can even see the sweat beading off the TNA wrestlers during their matches. The characters' movements come together in a fluid, hyper-violent ballet. It's easy to see that a lot of time and effort went into the motion capture for the game.

Of course, even with the game's surprisingly good looks, some occasional glitches hold things back. TNA iMPACT! still suffers from the clipping and collision issues that have affected other wrestling games in the past. Sometimes, particularly during grapples, a player's arm might seem to go through his opponent's head (which I'm sure would be a pretty lethal submission move in real life). You might reach down to pick up a prone opponent, only to lift him off the mat without ever actually touching his body. These glitches are to be expected, and they are no worse in TNA iMPACT than in any of the WWE games on the market, but they should still be addressed.

But how does the game play? As any fan will tell you, any wrestler in the ring is only as good as his moves. This is one area where TNA iMPACT! feels more like a lightweight than a heavyweight. The roster of available wrestlers is set at 25, with about half of those needing to be unlocked over the course of the game. Most of the main moves are identical for different characters. Short of a few minor differences, Sting plays just like Christian Cage, who plays just like A.J. Styles, who plays just like ... well, you get the idea. I would have liked to see a little more variety in the basic move sets, so that I didn't feel like I was spending most of my time playing the same person in a different skin.