Aside from the talk show mode, you can play through a quick exhibition match against the CPU or a friend. You can play a couple of bonus games, like a king-of-the-hill game where you must occupy a highlighted space in a level while staving off attacks from your opponent. There's a game of tag where the player who is "it" has his or her life meter periodically drained until he or she can knock down the opposing player and tag him or her as "it." There's also a very marginal create-a-wrestler mode where you can choose from about 15 prerendered character models, edit their move lists, and change their basic costume colors. None of the bonus games really add anything to the game, since they are just as prone to banality as the rest of the game. The create-a-wrestler mode is amazingly lacking when compared to the create-a-wrestler mode in other games. The game is also playable by two players, but the two player game suffers from the same problems as the single-player, so there really isn't much fun to be had here, either. Ultimately, Backyard Wrestling just doesn't have much to offer in the way of variety or entertaining gameplay.
The game's talk show mode is basically its story mode; but it isn't a very good story.
Backyard Wrestling is also a pretty unimpressive-looking game. The wrestling environments are reasonably spacious, and they contain plenty of destructible elements to ram your opponents into, but, aside from these aspects, none of them look very good. Unfortunately, the ability to clip heavily through pretty much any solid object is rampant throughout. The wrestler models are pretty light on detail, though one nice thing is that they look progressively bloodier and beaten as the match goes on. All of the game's moves are highly exaggerated, in the same vein as Def Jam Vendetta, and, although they aren't quite as impressive as Vendetta's, they're still amusing to watch. The biggest graphical problem is the game's camera, which is incredibly unstable and frequently begins vibrating violently in close-up shots. The Xbox version of the game is decisively better looking, with much cleaner, brighter textures and a far more consistent frame rate. Additionally, most of the glitches found in the PS2 version don't seem to happen in the Xbox game--although wrestlers still periodically get stuck in sections of the game's levels.
The game's sound is its strongest feature, but this is largely due to its robust soundtrack. The game features more than 40 songs in all, from a multitude of punk, nu-metal, rap, and hardcore acts, like Andrew WK, Rancid, the Dropkick Murphys, Masters of Illusion, CKY, Chimaira, Further Seems Forever, Sum 41, American Hi-Fi, The Rise, Machine Head, Biohazard, Anthrax, Sepultura and, predictably, the Insane Clown Posse. The Xbox version also supports custom soundtracks. Aside from the soundtrack, though, there isn't much else to the audio presentation. The in-game sound effects are all pretty mediocre and lack any sounds that would give you a particularly good sense of the brutality of the weapon hits you're delivering. The voice work in the game is passable in the cutscenes (despite the lack of intended humor), but it's unintelligible during the wrestlers' intros.
Despite the nice array of destructible elements in the game's environments, they still lack detail and polish.
To sum it all up, Backyard Wrestling: Don't Try This at Home is basically a failed experiment. It does its best to try to be something different, and it does marginally succeed at this task. Despite being different, however, it also lacks the depth found in most modern wrestling offerings--both in gameplay and modes--and really won't satisfy the average fighting or beat-'em-up fan, either. Unfortunately, its lengthy laundry list of aggravating problems prevents it from being of even casual interest to wrestling fans on the hunt for diversity in their wrestling game libraries. Perhaps there's still potential for the Backyard Wrestling license in future releases, since the basic concepts for the game are inherently sound. However, there's simply no salvaging Don't Try This at Home, and, ultimately, it should be avoided.
What You'll Pay
- Set Price Alert
