[PS3] TNA iMPACT! Review

In the world of wrestling videogames, the WWE Smackdown vs RAW series has been the only wrestler out in the ring, but TNA Wrestling over at Orlando, Florida partnered up with Midway games to come out with their own game titled… TNA iMPACT! After over 2 years of development, is this game a knockout or a jobber? Let’s find out.

Don’t know who/what TNA is? Well here’s a quick little background. TNA was founded back in 2002 by a former WCW/WWF wrestler Jeff Jarrett. He gathered some former wrestlers from WCW, WWF and some independent talent to join the company, and that’s when TNA started. They just had Pay-Per-Views at first, then they got a TV deal to be on Fox Sports Net, but their biggest accomplishment was getting a prime-time slot on SpikeTV. They managed to get some recent WWE talent to join the team in the recent years including Booker T, Christian ‘Cage’ & Kurt Angle. Along the way they made some big stars out of guys like AJ Styles, Samoa Joe and Jay Lethal, who were just small-time wrestlers until they got a job at the company. TNA’s wrestlers are often smaller than standard WWE wrestlers which makes them look different (and considered weak-looking by some) and that is why most of the action is much faster paced than that of WWE’s. There’s a little background for you, now onto the game.

TNA iMPACT (as stated previously) has been in the works for over 2 years over at Midway games. They managed to get some of TNA’s top talent to do motion-capture work, voice-overs, the works. While all of this makes the game look like a pretty authentic TNA product, what you see is not always what you get in this game.

See from a graphical aspect, this game looks good. The wrestlers look very realistic, and don’t have that juiced-up look that the Smackdown vs RAW models have. The moves are ultra-slick, and at 60 frames per second you can certainly feel a big difference between this and the Smackdown games. But not everything is always good in happy town. TNA iMPACT is a very fun game… for the first 30 minutes.

When you first see a hurracanrana in this game you will go O_O, the counters are just plain awesome, and AJ Styles and Kurt Angle have some pretty sick DDTs and Headscissors… Kurt and AJ? Here’s the game’s biggest flaw, move-sets. When we first heard about the game, TNA wrestlers and Midway themselves said that they mo-capped over 2,000 animations total which gave people a lot to look forward to. What they promised and what’s in the final release of the game is not the same. Almost every single wrestler in the game uses shared moves. There are no powerbomb variations, different clotheslines, nothing. A wrestling game is nothing without its moves, and this one has very little of them. Little to the extent that basically every wrestler is missing one of his signature moves. Kurt Angle doesn’t have his Ankle Lock, AJ Styles doesn’t have the Pele Kick, even STING doesn’t have the Scorpion Death Lock. I can understand leaving out moves that WWE wrestlers use – Side note: During interviews, several TNA wrestlers admitted that they motion capture moves used outside of TNA including the Jackhammer and the Sweet Chin Music – but the fact not even TNA’s big boys have an accurate move set is just unacceptable. Each wrestler only has around 8 grapples total. Most of them consist of very standard moves just as a Hip Toss, Vertical Suplex, Arm Drags, etc. One of the game’s commercials talk about the game having “All the moves” of the TNA wrestlers, that’s just completely false.

You might think that’s the only real big issue with the game, but it doesn’t end there.

When Midway was talking about the game, they said that it was going to include more TNA-friendly matches such as the King of The Mountain match, Six-sides of Steel and Monsters Ball. None of that made the final cut. It’s one thing to talk about the features you want in the game, and it’s another to get people’s hopes up and just smash them down come game release.

The roster only features around 25 wrestlers (and Afro Thunder). AJ, Kurt, Abyss, Sting, most of the guys are there, but it has an outdated feel to it. Midway promised roster updates via DLC in the near future, but did not mention if there will be an additional fee for the content.

The online scene isn’t what they said it would be either. There are only two online match types… kinda. Regular 1 vs 1… and ranked 1 vs 1. That’s it. Even the game’s own website talked about having online Tag-Team matches & Tournaments, but all of that faded away too.

Midway also talked about having alternate attires for each individual wrestler… none of that either. The game actually only has 1 weapon, a steel chair. That might be fine for TNA iMPACT! 1, but given the fact that Team 3D (Brother Ray & Brother Devon), who just happen to be known for table spots are in the game, that’s just… stupid.

Aside from the Exhibition matches and online mode, there’s also a story mode. It’s about a (fictional) TNA wrestler that made it to the top, but once he got there LAX (Homicide and Hernandez) decided to go all gangsta on him and left him beat-up in Mexico. The nameless wrestler was left disfigured and he lost his memory, so he was left in the blank. The first thing you do is design the look of your wrestler, because apparently the plastic surgeon in Mexico can turn you into whatever you want. The “Create a Player” creation mode that you fool around with here is about the equivalent of WWF Attitude… for Nintendo 64. You don’t really get to choose much here. Pick between some different shirts and pants, a couple of different hairstyles, etc. and you’re about done. You can’t even really adjust the body, just choose between a buff guy 01, buff guy 02 and a fat man with a six-pack. There’s no room for making anyone interesting in here really. You don’t even get to choose your own moveset. You’re given a default one with a default finisher as well (Chris Sabin’s Cradle Shock). Throughout the game mode you unlock more moves, but there’s honestly not much to choose from.

The actual story mode is rather… unique. You start by wrestling in Mexico until you get to the U.S. and win a match that gives you a TNA try out. From there one you form a tag team with one Eric Young, and a bunch of other crazy nonsense happens. Chris Daniels and some other familiar faces pop up during the story mode, but almost none of them represent their actual TNA persona. The ones that do are just way too over the top. Since there really aren’t many match types in the game, all of the story mode consists of Tag Team matches with horrible AI team matches that MIGHT break up pins, to random 1 vs 1 matches against TNA wrestlers and random creations.

Look, I understand that the latest batch of SvR games have been less than stellar, SvR08 was just terrible. That is no excuse to release such a dull and repetitive game out to store shelves. Midway said that they couldn’t meet the final goal for the game and that they will try to add more wrestlers to the game by the way of downloadable content over PSN and Xbox Live. They couldn’t get all the moves that were mo-capped in the game, and they couldn’t add all of the match types they wanted in either. They said to look for all of that in TNA iMPACT 2, and that’s what annoys me. Good or bad, the game is still a full retail game with a nice $59.99 + tax price tag on it. It’s not like we’re getting a discount because they couldn’t get everything they wanted done on time. As a big wrestling videogame fan, I can’t say this game is worth a purchase, but might be a decent rental just so you can try out the game yourself.

With a small 25 man roster, lack of moves, variety, personality, accuracy, promise or value, TNA iMPACT for the PS3 is sadly a dud.

Score: 5/10