WWF War Zone

Developer: Iguana Entertainment West Publisher: Acclaim

Released: August 11, 1998 Rated: T 5/10

After maintaining the lucrative WWF video game license throughout the Hulkamania era on the NES, and into the 16-bit era alongside the New Generation, Acclaim barrelled ahead onto the PS1 and N64 with the hotly-anticipated WWF War Zone, the higher-ups at the company surely drooling the entire way as the WWF and wrestling as a whole entered its most popular period ever in the late ‘90s. Both WWF and rival WCW were generating massive ratings on TV each week and jockeying for position in every possible avenue. But while WCW had already embraced what would become the future of wrestling games with titles on both the PS1 and N64 developed by AKI Corp, Acclaim’s efforts would be based on transitioning their own established style to 3D, featuring all the flash and glamor warranted by the license, but unfortunately results in a title utterly archaic by today’s standards and with an unfortunately high barrier to entry compared to its competition.

The root cause of Acclaim’s woes when it came to making wrestling games, leftover largely from 16-bit offerings like Super Wrestlemania and Royal Rumble, among others, was in the approach to the product at hand with the same sensibilities as fighting games like Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat. In their defense, they can’t completely be faulted for this at the time, as there was little in terms of an established blueprint for the genre in an industry moving so quickly through the likes of the NES’s Pro Wrestling and Sega’s WrestleWar, and what players clearly wanted in the early part of the decade were those same fighting games, where novice players would watch the attract mode at the arcade, another player, or their own opponent execute exciting, complex moves via particular combinations of buttons, and strive to learn how to do the same with their own favorite characters. The other major franchise moving wrestling titles forward as a genre at this time was Fire Pro Wrestling, a prolific and iconic series based on timing and a rock-paper-scissors style balancing system, but one that infamously stayed stuck in Japan until the PS2 era, so even in that sense, western developers like Iguana Entertainment not using this example is still quite understandable.

But when we arrive in 1998, with a game like War Zone in development for most of 1997, still using these archaic systems as the basis for a fully polygonal, next-generation title seems far less excusable. Players want to book and play great matches featuring their favorite wrestling stars on the fly, and be able to create competitive, exciting matches with whoever they see fit, not have to learn the moveset of and become skilled enough to play and win with each featured character individually, and this is the unfortunately improper basis that causes WWF War Zone to lack any real essence of a fun wrestling game as we now know it, with 25 years hindsight of wrestling games being firmly established as their own genre and very unlike a lot of other combat-focused titles. It’s simply a very slow, unwieldy, and often counterintuitive title that practically punishes the player looking to recreate their favorite pay-per-view card or hold their own title tournaments by holding back the exciting moments behind a slow grind of a learning curve.

Nobody got time to memorize all that when they just wanna to Austin v. Bret at WM 13 and have it not suck.

That’s not to say that WWF War Zone is a complete failure, particularly for players who happen to have cut their teeth on it or similar titles, or even for those who simply have an appreciation or nostalgia for the product of the time period that Iguana Entertainment certainly had as much responsibility in portraying as they did to build and refine the fishbone skeleton of the game underneath. But whereas there’s a definite charm to the classic industrial look that matches that shown every week on Raw at the time, this is another area of the game that’s certainly not without its faults and peculiarities.

For one thing, we can make a few comments on the roster. Sometimes this feels like nitpicking, but I can confirm that whereas I may not know or care too much about the roster in something like a tennis or racing sim, the roster in a wrestling game is massively important in terms of both depth and accuracy. War Zone offers up a respectable number of total wrestlers for a game being made largely from scratch, with 18. But a closer look indicates a few issues, such as leaning on all three personas of Mick Foley (Mankind, Dude Love, and Cactus Jack) to pump up those numbers, while also underrepresenting the tag team division to an extent with only The Headbangers as far as true tag teams. Add in the fact that three more wrestlers – Bret Hart, British Bulldog, and Ahmed Johnson – had been out of the company for about half a year by the time War Zone released (the former two in pretty infamous fashion at that) and we unfortunately have something that amounts to more of a longtime lapsed fan’s recollection of the early Attitude Era than a snapshot of any point in this iconic period.

Beyond these most crucial areas like roster and gameplay engine, WWF War Zone is largely pretty hit and miss in some of its other areas of presentation. It’s certainly impressive that we have a primitive Create-A-Wrestler feature, a crucial feature in any forthcoming wrestling title, particularly for helping keep up with the product on TV, but one in which the competition would massively outclass Acclaim’s titles. Game modes start to show some variety with hardcore and cage matches adding a little bit of flavor to selections, but even the Royal Rumble mode exclusive to the N64 still can’t give players the full 30-man experience with such a small roster. The Season mode provides a good grind up the card to reach the main event, but is drawn out by too many repeat matches without even the hilarious and meme-able PS1 promos recorded by the stars. And the sound design, well, the sound design really has nothing positive to say – MIDI entrance music, sparse, dry commentary by Jim Ross and Vince McMahon, interspersed with shouts from the crowd that address “player 1” in a cringeworthy immersion break, all of which sound like they were recorded in an empty barn (or a poorly-attended indie show at the local high school gym). Flashes and bits of charm here and there hearken back to a very early representation of the beloved Attitude Era, but War Zone just doesn’t offer enough of even a foundation to warrant coming back to. At the very least, see Acclaim’s next and final effort with the WWF product to get a little bit more of what you might be looking for on that front.

Continuing Legacy

Acclaim would essentially always make some use of its wrestling engine up until the company’s closure in 2004, with three titles in the Legends of Wrestling series released in the sixth generation featuring dozens of performers from the past. Though not without some charm, it’s an oddly appropriate pairing of a company who would never truly modernize their engine, keeping it alive to the end with almost exclusively long-retired characters and workers.