Variety is the spice of life, and when it comes to wrestling games, the genre needs a good shake up. Of late, a few new contenders have come to the throne, in the form of Def Jam: Fight For New York and Rumble Roses, but after last year’s abominably poor performance, Eidos’ Backyard Wrestling franchise couldn’t really get much worse.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean that it has to get better either. Backyard Wrestling 2: There Goes The Neighborhood features all of your “favourite” Backyard Wrestling stars such as the Insane Clown Posse (formerly of WCW fame, I believe) and Sick Nick Mondo, as well as more dubious character choices, such as hardcore porn star Tera Patrick. The front end of the game is fairly straightforward, and despite some more than annoying guitar riffs that play whenever you make a selection, is competent enough. Venturing into Career mode also provides a surprise or two, with the main one being that you have to create your own character. In other games, this would be fairly refreshing, but in BYW2, its just painful. The idea is good, its just that the character creation tools are (like much else in the game) far too limiting to be of any use. Choose your body, pre-designed head (from a choice of five or six) and select some simple clothes and your move set. Easy to pick up, but devastatingly hard to create anything of any use.
The premise of the career mode is simple enough. Backyard Wrestling is hosting a pay-per-view event – “There Goes The Neighborhood” – in your town, and should you be skilled enough to make it through the waves of challengers, you’ll get a shot at a million dollars in the main event of the show. So off you go, for a quick fight in a trailer park or someone’s pool, to humbly start your wrestling career.
And then it all goes more than a bit pear-shaped. The combatants are ALWAYS running, and this makes them difficult to get to grips with. Also, it makes the game seem like an incredibly limited arcade fighter, rather than the simulation of hardcore wrestling that it claims to be. Your moves are limited too, with a few grapples and a simple selection of punches and kicks at your disposal, with your special move cropping up from time to time. If you’re standing on a ledge of some sort, be it on top of a trailer, on the lip of a pool or the roof of a car, you can pull off a “Ledge Throw” fairly easily, by grappling up from the front and choosing “Ledge Throw 1” or “Ledge Throw 2” with your X or Square buttons. This can be great fun, as the moves are generally so painful that you just have to groan as you both hit the ground.
Unfortunately, that’s where the fun ends and the annoyances begin. An AI system that is so dumb that it hurts, a graphics engine that reveals clipping and other such amateurities and that ridiculously stupid resonant bass sound that hurts your ears whenever you pull off a grapple or a special move all add up to a game that is sub-standard to say the least.
Backyard Wrestling 2: There Goes The Neighborhood will provide (again) limited fun in multiplayer mode, but only for a few matches. Throwing a plant pot at somebody’s head until the “Knockout” sign appears on the screen is as fun as it sounds, and the amount of places in which players can be pinned into the corner as you bash them to a pulp is astounding and removes the challenge from pretty much everything the game contains.
Last year’s attempt at recreating the spectacle that is Backyard Wrestling was unbelievably bad. Some improvements have been made, but not nearly enough to make Backyard Wrestling 2 seem like anything more than what it is – a rushed mess of a game that doesn’t follow up on its promises.
