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TNA Wrestling iPhone Review

Just how do you fit a wrestling game on a gaming rig with no buttons? You refashion the experience into what essentially boils down to a story-driven game of paper-rock-suplex. Longtail Studios has certainly taken a unique approach to the TNA license and it’s a strange outcome to see the story and RPG elements of the game outpace the actual wrestling action.

At the beginning of TNA Wrestling, you create a brand new wrestler from a very simple avatar factory — there are only a few faces to choose from and a handful of outfit pieces to customize with colors. Your first match is with some pompous ‘roid monster in a backyard show. However, it turns out that a TNA scout — one of the TNA Knockouts — is in the crowd and fancies your moves. She convinces you to try out for the federation and that’s where TNA Wrestling’s rather entertaining story begins. Between matches, you chat up all kinds of people in the business, from rival wrestlers to TNA faces, such as Kurt Angle and Sting. In each scene, you are presented with several dialog choices. Depending on your selection, you earn a reputation as a face (good guy) or heel (bad guy). Really, there isn’t all that much difference between what’s happening here and the paragon/renegade system in Mass Effect. It’s a pleasure to see Longtail Studios get very ambitious with narrative in an unlikely place.

Unfortunately, the wrestling itself is where the game stumbles. TNA Wrestling is not much of an action game. Instead, you select move options from menus that appear on-screen. Think of it as turn-based wrestling. After your opponent pulls his or her movie, you then start building your own response from a list of possible moves. There are moves that can be strung together into combos, too, but you risk getting a move reversed. Worse, you could possibly run out of moves to make (you have a set number of possible moves that increases as you level up your wrestler — another RPG-like feature) and wind up vulnerable to an attack.

The wrestlers look like toys.

The more matches you win, the more experience you bank. This experience translates into extra specials or finishers. These specials may be selected by just tapping on-screen options, but once engaged, you have a brief window to trace on-screen arrows or tap virtual buttons. If you fail to complete the patterns, you do not pull off the move. This is one of the brief high points of the wrestling action, which I found generally underwhelming. While I understand why a hardcore wrestling game might seem like a daunting proposition on the iDevices, I’m not sold on turning it into Pokemon. After all, Gameloft figured out how to make a successful action game with Hero of Sparta.

In addition to the career mode, TNA Wrestling includes a quick play tournament option with four different match types. Here, you can play with recognizable stars of TNA, although you must unlock the biggest names, like Angle. You really should start out with the career game because it eases you into the mechanics of a match while the tournament modes (such as Iron Man) assume you know what you are doing.

TNA Wrestling looks a lot like a mobile game that was ported up to the iPhone. Characters are made out of individual parts that move on hinges. It looks strange, especially when the joints don’t seem to match up just right. The wrestlers look like little inhuman toys at certain points. However, Longtail did a good job with the faces on both the in-game wrestlers and the portraits that accompany dialog scenes. The game is also flanked by a good soundtrack and lots of crowd noise.

[Thanks: http://wireless.ign.com]

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