Video Game Reviews: WWE 2K15

With the last gen versions of WWE 2K15 (Playstation 3/Xbox 360) getting a universal negative reception, can the current gen versions (PS4/Xbox One) deliver the hype? I am Julian Cannon and I am reviewing the Playstation 4 version of WWE 2K15.

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This game looks more close to real life than ever this time. From the camera angles to the lighting and the arenas along with the detailed look on the superstars and divas, this is the best looking WWE game to date. Most of the superstars and divas had their entire body scanned for the game. The ring was even scanned so it can look exactly like it is on TV. Everything may look a little smaller than the previous games but it will grow on you in time.

The roster is actually a huge let down. Compare the roster on last year’s WWE 2K14 to this game and you will notice that last year’s game had the better roster. It is good to see the addition of new NXT superstars such as Sami Zayn, Adrian Nevelle, Bo Dallas, Rusev and more, the rest of the roster is the weakest since Smackdown vs. Raw 2008. Many of the superstars are very outdated with their attires and music. Most notably, Dean Ambrose and Seth Rollins have their shield attire and music. However there are a few legends in the roster such as Booker T, Rob Van Dam, Kevin Nash, Ultimate Warrior and some good ones including The Wyatt Family, The Usos, Xavier Woods, Big E and more but some of the superstars in the game are exact copies of themselves (for example, current Batista and retro Batista should be just one character with a costume change instead of two separate characters).

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The gameplay has changed drastically for this year’s game. A new chain wrestling mini-game has been implemented to make matches play out more realistically. Pressing the grapple button at the beginning of the match will initiate a collar-and-elbow tie up. From there, each opponent will press one of three face buttons to place their opponent into a side headlock, a wrist lock or a waist lock with a rock-paper-scissors style outcome. (Headlock beats Wrist lock, Wrist lock beats Waist lock, Waist lock beats Headlock.) Whomever wins will place their opponent in the corresponding hold while both players rotate the right analog stick to find a “sweet spot”. If the attacker finds it first, they’ll perform a move, if the defender finds it first, they’ll gain the upper hand. Additionally, the attacking wrestler can strike or wrench the opponent’s limb, making it harder for them to find the sweet spot. This mini-game only happens 2-3 times during the match and can be turned off via the options menu. Strikes have returned to their normal speed with improved collision and selling animations from the opponent. Unlike in previous games, superstars will not stand up immediately after taking a bump or slam, the player must rotate the right analog stick in order to stand up.

The stamina system returns in this game but it has changed as well. It is a three-tier stamina meter which controls the pace of a match. Each move that is performed, especially striking and running, will drain the stamina meter. During the first tier, the wrestler will be full of energy and perform moves easily. During the second tier, the wrestler will begin to slow down. In the third tier, the wrestler will be completely exhausted, even being unable to perform their finishing moves should it drop too low. Although the stamina meter cannot be turned off, stamina will slowly regenerate as long as a meter is not depleted and can be adjusted to drain more slowly. The game’s submission system has been revamped. The “Breaking Point” submission system has been replaced with a two part circular gauge. The mechanic of the system remains mostly the same, but players only have to mash a single button rather than all four.

Wake-up taunt finishers are now known as “Charged Finishers” which combines the taunt & finisher into a single animation by pressing the finisher button when the opponent is grounded. Signature moves can now be stored as well. Catch and Catapult finishers have also returned. Both fighting styles and skill sets have been brought in to ensure that the characters behave more like their real-life counterparts. For example, high flyers like Rey Mysterio will not do power moves and will focus on diving and springboard moves while giants like Big Show cannot climb the turnbuckle and will focus on power moves. Superstars who cannot climb to the top rope can climb to the second rope and deliver moves such as Bret Hart’s elbow drop or Big Show’s slingshot body splash. The gameplay changes take some time to get used to so you will have to play around with it for a few times but if you do not like the new controls, you can revert to the controls from last year’s game.

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The 2K Showcase focuses on two rivalries. One of them focuses on the Triple H and Shawn Michaels feud which began in SummerSlam 2002 and ended in Bad Blood 2004 and the other is the CM Punk and John Cena feud that began in the summer of 2011 and ended in February 2013. I personally liked the HHH/HBK feud more than Punk/Cena but there should have been more feuds added to this mode such as Rock/Austin, Hulk Hogan/Randy Savage, Bret Hart/Kevin Nash and more that can fill up this mode but choosing only two out of many raises more questions than answers. The way you play these feuds is the same dragging style that was featured since WWE 13. Fight until a certain part of the body changes to red, do objectives, cutscene and repeat. I felt that this style of cut and paste should have not happened in this game. Two games to have this style is enough, three is overdoing it.

The MyCareer mode is the best mode in the entire game period. You take your created superstar and you build his career (cannot create divas on this version of the game). You start all the way at the bottom in the performance center, then to NXT. After you reach the ranks there, you will then head on to Raw and Smackdown and eventually to main event WrestleMania and become a WWE Hall of Famer. During this mode, whatever you do, outcomes in the experience such as wrestling as a Babyface or heel, forming alliances, and etc. there is a never ending cycle to this so it can get repetitive down the line. Also, There is a 1-5 star match rating system that will rate matches based on technique, pacing and momentum, with squash matches getting lower ratings and back-and-forth matches getting higher ratings.

There is new feature that allows you to import images from your computer to the game for created wrestlers but I couldn’t access this feature at the time I was reviewing this game due to the servers not being open yet. Also, returning from WWF No Mercy a very long time ago, every superstar and diva in this game is editable. You can change their entire look but you cannot change their hairstyles. The biggest blunder is that you can only create 25 superstars.

This is the point where it gets very disappointing. Players can no longer create divas, arenas, championships, finishers, use custom soundtracks (although an update to next gen consoles will fix this soon), and the only preset custom entrance for custom superstars is the one where the superstar is carrying the phone.

There are also many and I mean MANY matches removed on the current gen consoles

1 vs 1:

– Inferno
– Ladder
– I Quit
– 2 out of 3 Falls
– Special Referee (yet is in the showcase mode)
– Casket (yet is in the Showcase mode)
– 3 stages of hell (Yet is in the showcase mode)
– Backstage Brawl

2 vs 2:

– Tornado Tag
– Extreme Rules
– Hell in a Cell
– Ladder
– Steel Cage
– Table
– TLC
– Elimination Tornado
– Elimination Table
– Mixed
– Backstage Brawl

Triple Threat:

– Falls Count Anywhere
– 2 out of 3 Falls
– No DQ
– Ladder
– Steel Cage
– TLC
– Backstage Brawl

Fatal 4 Way/4-Man:

– Battle Royal
– Hell in a Cell
– Ladder
– Steel Cage
– Table
– TLC
– Falls Count Anywhere
– 2 out of 3 Falls
– No DQ
– Backstage Brawl

6-Man:
– Elimination Chamber Tag
– Championship Scramble (Was removed in 2k14, but notable still)

Handicap Matches:
– All handicap matches

Final thoughts: if you want this game, the only good things are the MyCareer mode and the new gameplay features. You cannot hype a game this much for 6 months and then give us a half-assed game with missing features. 2K showcase is just a copy and paste of 30 years of WrestleMania from last year’s game and the Attitude era mode from WWE 13. I cannot find a reason why to spend $60 plus tax on a game that presents only half of what last year’s game had. If they kept all of those features in, this would have beat out last year’s game. I know this year’s game engine is built from ground up but that is no excuse to remove many features especially for the ones in the create suite community. The decision to take away the ability of creating divas is a slap in the face to every women who plays WWE games. Although you can create divas on the last gen version, that is not the point. My conclusion is that everyone should wait for next year’s game instead or keep 2K14 until next year. This game gets a final rating of 5.5/10

Video game reviews: Destiny

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What a disappointment. Destiny isn’t a bad game, per say, but it doesn’t come anywhere close to living up to its original promise. At its core, Destiny is what Bungie likes to call a “shared world shooter.” It has the controls and mechanics of a first person shooter, the progression system and sandbox open worlds of a role playing game, and the online connectivity of an MMO. To set Destiny apart from the competition, Bungie promised that it would feature a sprawling, dynamic, and ever-evolving galaxy with a rich story that could make the game last as long as a decade. What I got instead was a largely formulaic game that I don’t foresee playing for more than a week or two.

One of Destiny’s biggest missteps is its story missions, which I expected to be the highlight of the game considering Bungie’s track record with the Halo series. Despite its rich lore, the story itself is extremely lackluster; unfinished even. By the end of the main campaign, I found myself just as confused about vague entities like The Darkness and The Traveler as I was when I first booted up the game, and I never quite got the sensation that a chapter of a long running series had come to a close. Instead, it felt more like someone had torn off the second half of an already incomprehensible and boring book. Like a season of Lost, Destiny answers few of the questions surrounding its world’s mystery, but at least Lost presented its story in a compelling way. Rather than taking advantage of the interactive medium that is video games to draw players into the world to make them feel like they are experiencing events unfold, the game takes to exposition through Peter Dinklage’s boring narrations as the Ghost (the player’s miniature levitating artificial intelligence robot companion) to tell its story. Playing through Destiny’s main campaign was essentially like playing through a sophisticated audio book – one with little to no character or plot development.

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Even more monotonous than Destiny’s story was the mission structure, which remains exactly the same for every mission from beginning to end. Missions essentially bog down to going from point A to point B, deploying the Ghost to scan or hack an alien technology, and then either going from point B to point C and deploying the Ghost again, or, usually in the final stages of a mission, fighting off a horde of enemies while the Ghost hacks into whatever system it was deployed to. That’s about it. It was fun the first few times, but this repetitive mission structure became stagnant and stale very quickly, especially throughout the course of a dozen or two hours. The only reason I stuck with the main campaign was because it was one of the best ways to level up my Guardian, but it felt like a tedious chore for the most part. Without a doubt, Destiny’s main campaign is the worst aspect of the game.

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To navigate from mission to mission, players must make use of the game’s beautifully presented galactic map, which shows accessible planets in the Solar System. Planets and missions are unlocked as players complete story missions, which further incentivizes players to complete Destiny’s boring main campaign . When a planet is selected from the galactic map, it zooms in to show a map of its sandbox game world with various map markers, each of which represent a mission. It’s only after selecting one of these markers that players will be taken to their selected planet to tackle their selected mission. Most of them are story missions, but each planet features at least one Patrol mission (which allow players to free roam a planet’s sandbox world and complete small and often tedious and boring objectives) and one Strike mission (instanced dungeons tackled with a strike team), and some planets feature high level events called Raids.

While these sandbox worlds are large in volume, I would be more thrilled if they weren’t so barren. Filling Destiny’s worlds with interactive NPCs who could tell players more about the lore and the situation of a particular planet or offer players side quests would have gone a long way into making the worlds of Destiny more compelling. These worlds do spawn enemy creatures throughout the map once in a while, but unfortunately, the enemy variety in Destiny is abysmal. Each enemy race (Fallen, Hive, Vex, and Cabal) only features a handful of creature types whose color palettes change every once in a while to indicate that they are a higher level than the ones from before. While the game does space out the introduction of each enemy race evenly, there is a long stretch of time between each introduction, and during that time, I found myself facing the same handful of enemy types over and over again. Once I did encounter a new race, it wouldn’t take long before the game showed off all the creature types of that race, and the cycle would repeat.

Despite its incomprehensible and uninteresting story, formulaic mission structure, barren game worlds, and lackluster enemy variety, the game does make some great strides when it comes to core gameplay mechanics. As you would expect from a Bungie game, gunplay is fast-paced, smooth, and satisfying. The game does only run at 30 frames per second, which may disappoint competitive players, but in my experience, that did little to detract from accurate and precise shooting. The gunplay feels even more thrilling when combined with the game’s high level of challenge. The game is not a cakewalk by any means. While it is mostly a run and gun game, players who don’t take the occasional cover or choose a strategic position from which to take out their enemies will find themselves hitting the sack often, especially because of how smart, relentless, and visceral the enemy AI is. Despite the game’s repetitive mission structure, the challenge it offers does make it satisfying to overcome each mission.

Where Destiny shines even brighter is its RPG elements. Character progression in particular is very well executed and quite addictive, making the chore of playing through story missions to level up or to obtain new items and equipment almost worthwhile. The game begins with players choosing one of three classes (Titan, Warlock, or Hunter) and customizing their race, gender, and appearance. Only the player’s class will have any major impact on gameplay; the rest are simply aesthetic choices. I was expecting character customization to be more extensive than choosing from a bunch of presets, but there are enough options to allow players to create relatively unique characters.

With each level, players will earn new skills that are unique to their subclass. Each one of the game’s three classes features two subclasses: one which is readily available from the beginning and another that unlocks at level 15. Since each subclass can equip any kind of weapon, choosing a subclass is less about filling the shoes of a pre-defined role and more about finding something that matches your playstyle. The Titan’s Striker subclass is suited players who like to run-and-gun and get up close and personal, while the Defender subclass is suited for players who like to play defensively. The Warlock’s Voidwalker subclass is suited for players who like high offense and crowd control at the sacrifice of defense, while the Sunsinger subclass are like clerics in MMORPGs: geared more towards those who prefer a support-based playstyle. Finally, the Hunter’s Gunslinger subclass are for marksmen who are all about precision shooting, while the Bladedancer subclass are for those who like to use stealth and close quarters combat to outdo their enemies. But at the end of the day, players can take advantage of each subclass’s skills any way they please, use them with any combination of weapons, and develop a style of their own. The best part is that players can switch between active skills and on the fly to mix and match ones that better suit their playstyle for certain situations. The game even allows players to switch between subclasses on the fly, which is almost unheard of. Destiny truly does offer one of the most flexible character progression systems out there.

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Leveling also influences what weapons and armors players can equip, since equipment in Destiny are only capped by the player’s level. Destiny does not feature any attributes which players can add points to after leveling like in other RPGs or MMORPGs. Instead, most of a Guardian’s power and stats are directly influenced by their equipment’s stats, so it’s vital that players obtain up-to-level equipment as soon as they can. Since equipment has such a large influence in Destiny’s character progression, finding new ones always feels like Christmas, especially since most of them look pretty cool, especially towards the higher levels. The satisfaction that comes from equipping Guardians with new gear and watching and feeling them grow more powerful, paired with the game’s flexible character progression, was one of the main reasons I kept coming back to Destiny despite its repetitive nature.

Destiny soft caps players to level 20, but players can go beyond that by equipping rare equipment that come with a stat called Light. The higher the amount of Light in a piece of gear, the more powerful it is, and the total amount of combined Light will define how many levels above 20 a Guardian is. Some equipment with Light can be found by playing missions in high difficulty after reaching level 20, but the most powerful weapons and armor can only be purchased through one of various vendors in The Tower (the game’s social and non-hostile hub). These vendors only accept one of the game’s various currencies.

Glimmer is what players will be using initially to purchase items, weapons, and armors, but eventually, they will begin to earn Vanguard Marks, Crucible Marks, Motes of Light, and Strange Coins. Vangaurd Marks can most effectively be earned by playing Strike missions in the Vanguard hub or by completing Vanguard bounties, Crucible Marks can only be earned by playing competitive multiplayer matches in the Crucible hub, Motes of Light can most effectively be earned by leveling up after reaching the level 20 soft cap, and Strange Coins can most effectively be earned by completing weekly heroic Strike missions. Earning these different currencies is an extremely slow process that involves repeating certain tasks over and over again. It’s tedious and it definitely feels like grinding, but those who can bear with it will be greatly rewarded. I do wish that the game would simply have one universal currency though. By the time I reached level 20, I felt as though I had wasted my time collecting and saving up Glimmer, as they cannot be used for anything substantial towards the end game. At least giving players the ability to convert Glimmer into other currencies, even if at a high cost, would have made a big difference.

It’s not all about cooperation though. Another way the game brings players together is through Crucible, Destiny’s competitive multiplayer hub. Crucible features four game modes: Control, Clash, Rumble, and Skirmish. There are other game modes that will become temporarily available in the coming days and months through special events, but I’ll be reviewing the game as it ships. Control is your typical point-control style game mode, Clash is essentially team deathmatch, Rumble is free-for-all deathmatch, and Skirmish is similar to team deathmatch, but it reduces team sizes from 6 to 3 while allowing players to revive fallen comrades, encouraging them to stick together. Destiny doesn’t do anything revolutionary with competitive multiplayer, but I still found it to be a lot of fun. The Guardians’ powers in particular separate Destiny’s competitive multiplayer from the competition, as they bring about an interesting new dynamic to what could have otherwise been a sterotypical multiplayer mode. The ability to use earned gear to annihilate other players is an added bonus.

The biggest praise I can give to Destiny is that it’s presentation is immaculate. Despite its lackluster story and narrative, the lore has been richly realized through incredible artistic direction and visuals. I was skeptical at first about Bungie’s intentions to mix the aesthetics of fantasy with sci-fi, but it paid off big time. The lore looks and feels like a fantasy story taking place in the future. Even more mesmerizing than the game’s visuals is its soundtrack. Destiny features some of the best orchestrated music I have listened to in a video game in a long time, and they kick in just at the right time during gameplay to provide the appropriate mood and atmosphere for certain situations. It’s easy to tell that everything about Destiny’s lore, aesthetics, and presentation has been crafted with love and care.

Despite Destiny’s beautiful presentation and polished core mechanics, its lackluster story, uninteresting worlds, and repetitive mission structure keep it from becoming legend. The game is by no means a disaster. The satisfying gunplay, the challenging missions, and addictive character progression will keep players hooked for a decent amount of time. But in its current state, there is no way this game can stay alive for 10 long years. I don’t think Bungie comprehends just how long that is, especially if they expect players to repeat the same mission structure over and over again while experiencing a story that is as incoherent as it is uninteresting. It’s hard to say what the future holds for Destiny, since the game will constantly evolve as new content is added throughout its lifespan, but as it stands, Destiny is a good game that could have been so much more.

My final rating for this game is a 7.5/10

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