WWF Attitude

Developer: Acclaim Studios Salt Lake City Publisher: Acclaim

Released: August 31, 1999 Rated: T 5/10

If I were assigning half-point scores on these ratings, WWF Attitude would be a key candidate for a 5.5 rating, if only to denote what it does to hold a leg up on its predecessor, which if you’re reading this collection of profiles alphabetically, I go on at length about with far more focus on the game engine. What’s important to understand first about WWF Attitude compared to the previous year’s War Zone, is that regardless of how we feel about it now, War Zone was far from a failure, and with the WWF and wrestling in general still cooking with absolute fire, everybody involved would be clamoring for a follow-up as quickly as possible. And with this both being the year-on sequel and Acclaim’s last hurrah with the license – WWF would find the greener pastures of the AKI engine with WrestleMania 2000 before the end of the same year.

Yet another snapshot of this game’s timing: black bar steel cage!

What this leaves us with for Attitude, a title originally scheduled for release as early as March 1999, only to release on consoles in August, is a tremendous update in terms of content and window dressing compared to War Zone, but with basically no change to the gameplay engine or controls. That’s disappointing, but familiar to anybody even remotely aware of the situation with many yearly sports titles, a genre which modern WWE is firmly rooted in, and more or less has been since right around this time when they achieved some of their biggest mainstream crossover. At its core, it’s a bad game on a bad foundation, losing even more ground at this point to the superior games WCW was releasing, and nothing was going to change that in only a year.

I imagine basically every post-match summary looks like this. Or has a little more red.

What we do see fixed here is the instantly out-of-date roster and presentation of War Zone and its lengthy production cycle, to the point that I would argue that the roster is actually rather impressive. While deadlines still produce a bit of a lapse from the product on TV at the point of release, it’s far more expansive this time around, with 40 wrestlers, and basically, if you worked WrestleMania XV a few months prior, and didn’t get schooled by Butterbean in a shoot fight, you’re in the game. And with some new features like Create-A-PPV mode, a deeper Create-A-Wrestler mode, customizable arenas, better music, and a far superior career mode that follows something of a proper yearly calendar of events, this is a far deeper experience all around than the previous offering. There’s a lot to see in this game, for sure, and I would go so far as to say that if this game had the exact same amount of content, with the AKI engine, it would be deservingly revered on the same level as those games, as it captures a slightly different era of the WWF just as well, only missing an actual fun game to play to do the roster and vibe the same justice.