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Showdown: Legends of Wrestling 
Release date: 02 Jul 2004
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Mygamer review
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It makes a great coaster, brother!
Acclaim's Showdown: Legends of Wrestling for PlayStation 2 is just as well not named Legends of Wrestling III because that would denote a sequel. Hiding behind a new name, Showdown is no steps forward and two steps back from its nostalgic predecessor, Legends of Wrestling II. The only showdown here will be between you and the store clerk trying to get your money back. Even the most hardcore wrestling fans will have difficulty finding the good in this game due to the overwhelming lack of content and broken, buggy gameplay.
The upgraded front end is nice-looking and successfully conveys the feel of an old-school arena gearing up for some rasslin' action and the load screens even correspond to their match types. There are three modes of actual gameplay; Quick play, which allows for random matches without having to select wrestlers or match types, Match Play, where gamers will lock up with their friends or the CPU in a variety of match types, and the new story mode Showdown Challenge. Several new match types have been added including Iron Man, Best 2 of 3 falls and Table match, but there is still no mixing of match types- no tag team table matches or ladder matches in a cage. It remains very cut and dry.
Included in Match Play are Classic Matches designed to let the user play through some of wrestling's greatest matches including Hogan vs. Andre and Bret Hart vs. Owen Hart. This falls short of what it could have been because the user can't select which wrestler to control, gameplay starts halfway through the match and upon completing all of them you are rewarded with exactly nothing. Tag team matches still support up to eight players through multitaps, but for some reason the Battle Royale only allows four men in the ring at a time.
Showdown Challenge is where the game completely taps out. You start off green at the beginning of the 1970s and must battle through the 70s, 80s, and 90s until you finally battle Hulk Hogan to become the Showdown Champion. Even though each era takes place over the course of ten years they each only consist of five or six matches. At the end of each decade you must defeat the era champion before advancing to the next and intermittently you will hear from Hogan during the brief storybook pages that Showdown passes off as storylines between matches.
Everything about this mode is ridiculous. After a wrestler becomes the champion of the 70s era he must then wait another twenty years to fight Hogan. If Hogan is already the Showdown Champion at the end of the 70s, why not fight him then? How is Hogan the champion at the same time you are? The user must wrestle for two more decades to face Hogan at the end of the 90s. Assuming Hogan had to endure a similar ordeal to become the Showdown Champion, he'd be at least sixty by the end of the game. Furthermore, conversing with Hogan in the 70s or 80s knowing that the match against him won't be until the end of the century makes it feel like Hogan is communicating from the future. And yes, if you decide to play as Hogan you end up fighting yourself. Completing Showdown Challenge yields no reward beyond a frightening picture of Hogan letting you know that you're the champion. At no point do you receive a title belt, a new playable character or a video interview as in LOW II.
Showdown's controls have been simplified, and provide a more pick-up-and-play experience thanks in part to the frequent on screen button prompts. Page seven of the manual instructs the user to go through the Bret Hart tutorials because "it's about the only chance in hell you have of beating the game." This is absolutely true…unless you can find the strike button. You can perform not only front and rear grapples, but different sets of front and rear grapples depending on whether your opponent is standing or bent over, same goes for front and rear ready attacks, but since all moves do the same damage and build the same momentum, there's no incentive to chance a time-consuming turnbuckle or grapple move when strikes are faster and just as effective. Once the momentum meter is full from repeatedly punching the opponent, finishers can be executed. Like in LOW II the user must stun his opponent once the finisher is available but that's where the similarity ends. Finishers are now completely automated; if Hogan is standing over an opponent and his Gorilla Press Slam finisher is activated he'll roll the opponent over, stand him up and perform the move all with the push of one button. The good news is that once earned a finisher won't disappear and can be used at the user's discretion. In case pressing X is too hard, the AI is extremely stupid and most matches can be won via count out since the CPU has little to no inclination to return to the ring.
The game play in general is awful; in LOW II, moves could be countered repeatedly, with each successive counter becoming slightly more difficult. Showdown allows for only two counters; if an opponent throws a punch and you counter, it can then be countered again and the hit is guaranteed. Note that some moves can't be countered and can be performed infinitely, including the low blow and bionic elbow. At the expense of the complex ISP attack system which allowed for moves to be linked together by the user at the appearance of a button prompt, moves now link into one another without the user's consent. You may perform a move which is followed by a pin or submission that you didn't count on.
If an opponent is stunned in a corner or against a rope he can't be grappled. Either you perform one of the available moves or you wait until he's recovered. There's also no rhyme or reason as to when wrestlers become stunned…it can even happen after one punch. The disgusting collision detection doesn't help any and the greater the size difference between opponents the worse it looks. Even the weight balance system is unfinished. Andy Kaufman can't grab Andre the Giant and body slam him, but he can counter some of Andre's moves into a body slam. The character models do, however, look better than those seen in LOW II, for whatever it's worth.
Showdown's CAW mode now includes a geometry editor and allows for the pre-existing Legends to be altered. The tiny move lists and clothing selections are left over from LOW II, except now you can't even change the color of the clothing. This is the buggiest portion of the game and I even found a dead end (a reboot was necessary) when attempting to change Hogan's facial hair. The geometry editor permits a large body and small arms, leaving the arms disappearing into the body, and if you try hard enough (or not at all) you can make the head float within the neck. By simply changing the size of Bret Hart's head his hair model became completely detached.
When creating movesets, each time a new move is scrolled to the character model doesn't reset his position and the user must constantly rotate the camera to see the move from the desired angle. To view a move again the user must scroll away and then back as there is no option to repeat the animation.
Even the commentary from Tony Schiavone, Larry Zbyszko and Bobby "The Brain" Heenan doesn't help much. After a few playthroughs you've heard everything they have to say and it becomes extremely repetitive. Each match has generic opening commentary that can last upwards of thirty seconds before anything match-specific is mentioned. The best portion of Showdown is the tutorial mode narrated by Bret Hart, explaining-more or less-how to play; only this is just a series of videos and non-interactive.
Page four of the manual states "we respect the wrestling business and we especially respect you – the wrestling fan" but nothing could be further from the truth. This game not only spits in the face of anyone who's ever played a wrestling game, it spits in the face of anyone who hasn't. The only hidden features are teleporting wrestlers, stretched textures and if you're lucky, a green screen crash. It's a small miracle that this made it through Sony's compliance testing.
Review by Dave Kaplan on 7 Oct 2004
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