ECW Hardcore Revolution - Dreamcast

by Acclaim

Another game in what seems to be a never ending stream of wrestling titles released over the last few years, and one of the last titles to come out of the Acclaim stable before the release of Legends Of Wrestling...

In a departure from WWF, this game deals with one of their rivals, ECW (Extreme Championship Wrestling), more accurately, with the hardcore element of ECW which is significantly more bloodthirsty than your typical WWF/WWE encounter.

There are a variety of game modes available from a single exhibition match up to an extensive career mode where you take part in a series of matches to try to improve your ranking within the ECW. There are plenty of match types on offer in the exhibition modes including hardcore, cage matches, barbed wire matches (painful!), and much more, as well as Acclaim's standard Create A Wrestler mode. There's certainly enough variety to keep you occupied for quite a while.

Where this game is let down is in it's origin. This is little more than a reworking of Acclaim's earlier wrestling title, WWF Attitude and if it wasn't for the wrestlers and graphics, you'd be hard pressed to tell them apart. I was never impressed with WWF Attitude on the Dreamcast because of it's poor control system. For any fighting game, the controls have to feel intuitive and natural - you need to feel so at home with the controls that you can concentrate on putting moves together, not trying to remember how to move around the ring.

There have been no improvements made to the controls since WWF Attitude, and I soon found myself tiring of the game as a result. The controls are unresponsive and it seems that the CPU can often perform moves easily while the player struggles to get his or her wrestler to do anything other than walk around the ring and throw a few punches and kicks.

Each of the wrestlers in the game has their own intro and music, but Acclaim decided to make use of the games engine to recreate these with the accompanying music - there are no video entrances here, unlike WWF Smackdown on the PS2. Another thing I found here was that the animation of the wrestlers as they approached the ring was nothing short of comical. They wrestlers all stagger as they approach the ring as if they were severely constipated!!

Then we come onto the visuals themselves. The animation on the wrestlers is quite poor - the wrestlers seem to float around the ring and there hardly seems to be any frames of animation on the attacks. On an N64 or Playstation, this could almost be forgiven, but the Dreamcast is capable of so much more. The likenesses and costumes of the wrestlers have been done very well so there is never any doubt over who you are controlling, but this is just a small part of the game's graphics.

Don't get me wrong, there are some good aspects to this game, most notably in the sound department. As well as the intro music for all the wrestlers and the usual grunts, groans and sound effects, Acclaim managed to get all of the wrestlers into a recording studio to get their actual voices for in game speech and taunts. It's a nice touch and it makes me wonder why THQ haven't done this yet for the WWF Smackdown series...

Also, the crowd noises are more than just mindless cheers. The crowd reacts to the action and will often be heard chanting for particular wrestlers, hurling abuse at some, cheering others on. It makes the crowd seem more a part of the game than in other wrestling games I've played so far.

As expected, there is full commentary throughout but in order to try and fit it all onto a single disc, most of the time the wrestlers are referred to as "Player 1" etc. so it does spoil the atmosphere created by the rest of the sound, even if it is from the regular ECW commentators.

Finally, as the title suggests, this game is all about hardcore wrestling and as fights progress, you get to see damage on your opponents ranging from minor bruising to cuts and blood-soaked faces. Okay, it's all a bit gratuitous, but it does offer something that other wrestling games have avoided.

Since the collapse of ECW and WCW, a large number of wrestlers have migrated across to the WWE and there are quite a few names here that you'll find familiar if you are a WWE fan, namely RVD, Tajiri, Justin Credible, Raven, Rhyno, Jazz, Spike Dudley, Lance Storm and Taz. As several of these still haven't made an appearance in any of the WWF games so far, this is your only chance to get to play with them.

Overall, I was extremely disappointed with this game. The controls made the game more random than it should have been and it lacks the polish of THQ's WWF games for the Playstation and Playstation 2. I can't see how Acclaim could justify taking one of their existing games and doing little more than changing the graphics and selling it as a new game.

Overall - 67% - Reviewer: Simon Plumbe