WrestleQuest – Review | Brandon Hofer's Portfolio

A love letter to wrestling fans and the wrestling industry in general, WrestleQuest mixes crazy action and insane stories with RPG gameplay. It is an interesting idea that produces mixed results at times. This game is aimed at long-time wrestling fans with some deep cuts that those who know the sport’s history will appreciate. As you progress through the story, you will come across industry icons on your way to chasing your personal fame and fortune.

If you enjoy the way classic RPGs play, you should feel right at home here. The combat is turned-based but also includes some different button presses so you can inflict additional damage. The twist here is that every fight occurs in a wrestling ring, mostly in front of a crowd. At times you will be fighting by yourself. Sometimes you will have a partner; in other instances, you will have a trio to battle against the enemy. Depending on what you want to do, there is a decent amount of depth here. There is the traditional strike which is self-explanatory. As a wrestler, one of your responsibilities is to get the crowd pumped up and involved with the show, so one of the options here is to taunt your opponent, which will rile up the audience. You have your standard item menu, where you have items that can recover your health points (HP) and your ability power (AP).

Your AP comes into play in the other option, the gimmicks menu. In WrestleQuest, gimmicks are your special moves. For example, if you have enough AP, you can perform a “South of the Border” Stunner as Muchacho Man. You can also perform a “Flying Elbow Drop.” There are also tag team maneuvers such as “Brooterly Love” and “Toybox Blockbuster.” There are also a couple of moves when you have all three members in the ring with you, and then, of course, professional wrestling needs to have managers as well. To win the fight, you need to pin your opponent. The pinning mini-game has a meter, and you need to be able to hit the button when the needle is in the green three times, the same amount of times a referee’s hand needs to hit the mat in an actual wrestling match.

The additional damage you can perform after every strike is done with a timed button press. I didn’t particularly care for this decision as I can see some people that are going to have a hard time doing it due to the timing ring closing so quickly. It would have been a nice feature if they gave you the option of slowing down the ring for those who might not have the quickest reflexes. As I mentioned, this is an RPG, and you must manage your HP and AP accordingly. If you don’t have any desire to do so, or if you are new to RPGs and don’t know how to do it, there are some options where you don’t have to worry about it.

There are three combat options available. There is “Max Damage,” where you will essentially wipe out enemies with a single blow. There is “Auto-Pinning,” where you can avoid that pinning mini-game altogether. Then there is “Immortality,” where your characters are invincible. It should be noted that achievements will still unlock when using these different options.

The story in WrestleQuest is something wrestling fans will appreciate. The storyline here follows two different guys that have similar dreams. Brink Logan comes from a wrestling family and teams with Stag Logan. Their tag team is called the “Honest Bucks,” and they are trying to make their way up to PAW. Think of PAW as basically the WWE in the real world. The other main character is the Muchacho Man, and yes, Macho Man Randy Savage is his idol. He is trying to preserve the integrity of the sport while also hoping to make it big. There is an eclectic cast of characters that you will meet as you ascend up the ranks of the wrestling world, just like in real professional wrestling.

I mentioned earlier that WrestleQuest is a mixed bag in certain areas. During the game’s later stages, there is a mini-game that you will be required to play that is one of the worst mini-games I have played in a long time. This mini-game turns the game into a platformer for a few moments, but jumping is only done by holding the button down for a specific time. If you hold the button down for too long or not long enough, your character doesn’t jump correctly, and you risk losing. The whole thing is an exercise in frustration.

You also want to save often and have a backup save. Toward the end of the game, when I lost a match, the game reloaded my last save point. The problem is that it put my character in an arena where I could not leave. It was a game-breaking bug. What I had to do was quit the game and then manually load one of my save files. Fortunately, that worked, and I only lost about 20 minutes of progress instead of 20+ hours of gameplay because if that had happened, I would have quit the game immediately and deleted it off my hard drive. Hopefully, I am the only person this will happen to, but make sure you manually save regularly.

WrestleQuest is something wrestling fans will truly enjoy from a sentimental perspective. The story overstays its welcome a bit, but I loved the nostalgia throughout the game. You can clearly see the love of wrestling the development team had and their care with the different legends like Macho Man Randy Savage, Ric Flair, Sgt. Slaughter, and more. This game has some issues, but I still appreciate the developers’ respect for this popular sport, which turned into a mostly fun game.

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