WWE WrestleMania XIX review (GameCube)

Essentially, your ultimate goal in revenge is to create chaos, and eventually ruin Wrestlemania. The mode has four levels, with six missions apiece. These levels range from the arena construction site, to an outdoor parking lot, and even a shopping mall. Examples of some of the missions you'll have to undertake include destruction missions, where your entire goal is to wander around, beating up cars and signs; objective missions, where you'll have to find a certain object or area of a level, and fight your way to it; and simple beat-'em-up missions, where you have to eliminate a series of security guards, and other blue-collar employees of Mr. McMahon.

There are two major problems with the revenge mode, both of which completely destroy any possibility of fun. The first is that none of the missions are particularly well designed or interesting to begin with. Maybe in an action adventure game it might make sense for your main character to run around a construction site, throwing bad guys off a ledge into a pit of blackness, and then try to locate some tough-to-reach item--but considering this is a wrestling game, the whole adventure element just feels really bizarre and out of place. Additionally, all of the missions are extremely repetitive in their design and flat-out uninteresting to play.

The second and most damning of issues in revenge is that most of the missions involve multiple enemies coming at you at once. While most of these enemies are just generic-looking thugs dressed like construction workers and security guards, evidently they're all actually really good wrestlers and can perform moves like spinning toe holds and swinging neckbreakers with the greatest of ease. Add in the fact that you're almost always going to be taking on two to three bad guys at once, and you're going to find yourself in an intensely frustrating situation in practically every mission, especially in any situation where you have to climb a cage or pole, where, in somewhat of a throwback to X8's unfair AI, no matter how bad you beat up the bad guys, they'll almost always magically find a way to get up just in time to stop you from reaching the top. All in all, revenge mode feels like it was thrown together using the worst aspects of a generic action game, mixed with the concept of 2000's WCW Backstage Assault, and it just isn't any fun.

Fortunately, WrestleMania XIX makes up for the lack of a decent story mode by providing a much-improved create-a-wrestler feature. The game's create-a-wrestler is basically a stripped-down version of WWE SmackDown! Shut Your Mouth's create-a-wrestler, but with a few added bonuses. All of the standard moves, appearance features, and logic/attribute functionalities can be edited to your particular desire, and there are plenty of available choices for each section. You should find it easy to create some of the newer additions to the WWE roster, since pretty much all of the necessary clothing and attributes are there. WrestleMania XIX also gives you more choices in designing your wrestler's entrance--you'll be able to decide what music your wrestler will use, which Titantron entrance video will play, what animations your wrestler will perform on the stage, on the ramp, and in the ring, and even what sort of pyro, lighting, and camera angles you'd like to use.

There are also a number of unlockable items that can be bought in the shopzone, which is modeled after the WWE's own merchandise store. In here, you can purchase new parts for your created wrestler, like new hairstyles, clothing options, entrance features, and moves. You can also buy new weapons that will appear during hardcore matches and the like, as well as attribute points that you can use to upgrade your created character's abilities. The one downside to the shopzone is that the only way to earn cash in the game is by playing through the revenge mode, and in order to buy all the unlockable items, you'll have to play through the mode at least a couple of times. Still, if you're willing to suffer through it, there's plenty of rewarding stuff to unlock.

From a graphics standpoint, WrestleMania XIX improves a few things over X8, but only marginally. The biggest improvement is shown in the wrestler models, which are significantly more detailed and far less generic looking. All the wrestlers have their correct faces and body builds, as well as all their trademark tattoos and costumes. All of the game's arenas are very well done, with good crowd graphics, excellent lighting, and some cool-looking pyro--though there are only five regular arenas in the game. Most of the facial animations from X8 have carried over into this year's game, and while they looked great last year, they aren't quite as impressive in XIX. In fact, this can be said for the bulk of animation in the game--most of the animations seem a bit on the stiff side when compared to SmackDown! Shut Your Mouth, and they don't flow together all that well. There are also some pretty rough clipping problems and a few obvious glitches in certain portions of the game, especially in the revenge mode, where frequently you'll see characters start to wig out and violently vibrate if they get sandwiched between another character and a wall. The revenge mode also has a free-form camera system that, for the most part, is just completely useless. You can control the camera with the right C stick, but rarely can you ever put it into a useful angle, and usually when you do finally find one, one of the game's replays will immediately revert you back to a horrid angle.

The biggest overall improvement Yuke's has made in WrestleMania XIX is in the category of sound. WrestleMania X8 didn't have much going on in the way of audio, and it didn't even feature most of the wrestlers' trademark theme songs. WrestleMania XIX contains nearly every wrestler's correct theme song and does so in very good quality. Additionally, nearly all the in-game sound effects have been upgraded, with far more realistic slams, smacks, crashes, and similar effects. A few wrestlers in the game actually have voices as well, including Al Snow, who periodically praises or admonishes you during the tutorial mode, and Stephanie McMahon, who appears in a couple of cutscenes in revenge. Most of the in-game music consists of passable, if uninspired, rock and techno tracks that aren't any better or worse than the standard wrestling-game fare.

WrestleMania XIX does do a number of things right, in that it makes some key improvements to X8's gameplay system, and the bevy of available match types, along with the decisively deeper create-a-wrestler mode, should provide wrestling fans with plenty of longevity. However, though WrestleMania XIX is a definite improvement over its predecessor, the game's few graphical hang-ups and detrimentally bad story mode ultimately mar what could have been a really great game. As it stands, though games like Def Jam Vendetta and Ultimate Muscle: Legends vs. New Generation are technically better wrestling games, WrestleMania XIX is still the best WWE game available on the GameCube, and, consequently, any GameCube-owning WWE fan would do well to give it a shot.