TNA Wrestling Preview
Total Nonstop Action Wrestling! That's what Namco hopes to bring to mobile devices later this year with its new, pared-down version of TNA Wrestling. At a recent Ignite media event in San Francisco, Namco proudly showed off the new title among scads of other multi-platform offerings. Longtail Studios created a surprisingly well-received 2009 mobile game of the same name and so while Namco's TNA looks pretty good so far, it definitely has some work to do before catching up with Longtail’s title.
Longtail's TNA impressed gamers with its RPG approach, not only allowing them to customize their wrestlers, level them up and unlock new moves, but also with the inclusion of dialog options and an actual storyline as well. If what we saw at the Ignite event is any indication, the new TNA eliminates most of that, going for a fairly simple fighting game. As in other TNA titles, the game includes familiar favorites like Hulk Hogan, A.J. Stiles and Ric Flair and does its best to recreate the dynamism of the TNA television experience. We played the game on iPhone and even that small, it looks pretty good—cleaner and a bit less cartoony than the Longtail game.
We fired up the single player mode and were faced with lots of choices. You can choose the type of match you want, such as Standard, Submission, or Falls Count Anywhere, and can also choose from a wide range of arenas including Impact! Zone, Bound for Glory, Turning Point and Final Resolution. You then move on to character creation where you can name your thick-necked champion, then decide just how thick-necked he's going to be. You can choose from three body types: normal, muscular and large (in other words, fat) and can change your wrestler's skin color, facial hair and (not that you can see this) eye color. You then decide what type of fighter your wrestler will be, choosing among: brawler, high flyer and power house, then use sliders to determine specific attributes like power, toughness, speed and charisma.
After you've done that, you'd think you'd be ready to fight but nope, there's still more stuff to customize. You set your difficulty (easy, medium or hard) then choose your moves from things like body slam, backbreaker, suplex, DDT, piledriver, spinebuster and facebreaker. Once that's set, then you select your finishing move from things like: black hole slam, border toss, running leg drop, olympic slam, 5 star frog splash, muscle buster, scorpion death drop, dinero express, Tower of London, flying elbow, chaos theory, eye of the storm and our personal favorite, grapefruit claw. Whew!
Once all this customization is done, you enter the ring in front of cheering crowds in your own bombastic special intro sequence and then get down to business. Our wrestler went up against Abyss and it took some time to get used to the admittedly strange touch screen controls. For one thing, the interface takes up a considerable amount of screen real estate on the iPhone (it's not such an issue on iPad). You have three clunky fight buttons on the right hand side and a virtual joystick on the left to move your wrestler. To execute a move, you have to futz with the somewhat finicky joystick until it moves your character near your opponent and then tap one of the buttons to execute things like grapples or bodyslams. While the controls make sense on paper, from what we saw, they're still not as easy to use or as responsive as they could be. The result was we often we found our badass wrestler stuck across the ring from Abyss, unable to lay even one meaty finger on him.
So far, TNAis looking graphically pretty good and is doing a fair job of shrinking the TNA wrestlers down so they fit in your pocket. As of this week's event however, the game still has a few control kinks to work out before the game is responsive enough to make it a must-buy. We'll keep our fingers crossed that they do though, at least for the sake of the fans out there who are excited to hear this new TNA title is coming to their favorite mobile devices. Look for TNA Wrestling later this year on iPhone, iPad and Android.
