As the years have gone on, the Showcase matches have gotten more cavalier about pulling control from the player in service of more accurate, non-playable cutscenes. More of an issue is the way these modes go about making the player engage with that history. Occasional veering from the legitimate history like this isn't a huge problem. Instead, it's an unnamed figure who does his best to stay out of the player's field of view as much as possible. Similarly, Mike Tyson isn't present for his "enforcer" role in Austin's title-winning Wrestlemania 14 match against Shawn Michaels. For perhaps obvious reasons, the Owen Hart portion of Austin's lengthy feud with the Hart Foundation is glossed over in video clips, as Hart isn't playable in the game. The core beats of each match are reenacted with decent accuracy, except where licensing issues prevent it. Like previous years, you engage with this history by playing through these matches, hitting specific moves and quick time events along the way.
It occasionally veers into the more obscure, early era matches he had in WCW and ECW, but largely keeps its focus on his rise from King of the Ring '96 through his historically long feud with Mr. Though it covers some of the same ground as WWE '13's Attitude Era mode, WWE 2K16's Austin showcase is a solid walking tour of many of the biggest matches and feuds of his career. Where last year's game tried to assemble a handful of unassociated feuds into a game that already felt barren and disjointed compared with its predecessors, the history of Austin's career makes for a decidedly easier sell.
Game wwe 2k16 series#
And like those infrequent, one-off appearances on WWE's weekly television, Austin's expanded presence seems meant to gin up interest in a video game series that, over the last couple of years, has had a bit less going on than usual. This year, the focus is on Austin, whose 14-year career peaked during the WWE's most tumultuous period, who Vince McMahon often credits for ushering in the Attitude Era and saving his company. You play through whatever the WWE and the development team consider to be the biggest, most relevant moments of an event, of an era, or even a single feud. Whether it's 30 Years of Wrestlemania, or an overview of the fabled Attitude Era, these games have become not just tools for players to create their own WWE-flavored moments, but loose history lessons as well. Since WWE '13, the developers of WWE video games have been providing fairly detailed, interactive retellings of the company's watershed moments. That's left to the Network, and, more often of late, the video games. WWE 2K16 brings back missing features and makes a few improvements, but it doesn't quite wash the taste of last year's mostly dismal game away. If you don't already know, the longest running weekly episodic television show in history isn't going to fill in the blanks for you. Here's Stone Cold Steve Austin to deliver a few hell yeahs before introducing the Undertaker, without ever diving too deep into the rich, bizarre history the two superstars have with one another. Here's Shawn Michaels, fresh from his latest trip to Cabela's, to tell the current world heavyweight champion why he's just an also-ran of the Heartbreak Kid.
![game wwe 2k16 game wwe 2k16](https://www.moderntechgamer.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/WWE-2K16-Apk-Gameplay-2.jpg)
Here's Ric Flair to deliver a trademark "Woo!" while "putting over" his daughter. History in the WWE is a marketing tool, a way to gin up interest in an episode where perhaps less is going on than usual. And even in those appearances, histories are only relevant insofar as they relate to what's happening this week, what rivalry is the current focus of storylines. The WWE Network, the company's perpetually not-quite-successful-enough streaming service, is an astonishingly rich collection of all that has come before in the world of WWE (and whatever other tape libraries they've seen fit to purchase), but rarely do you see that history portrayed with any significance on any of the weekly television programs.Īt best, history is periodically acknowledged, gestured toward, when a superstar of old is up for a Hall of Fame induction, or available for a brief public appearance. Yet the way the WWE chooses to leverage that long, exhaustively documented history is peculiar. As announcer Michael Cole reminds us often both on television and in the company's licensed video games, Monday Night RAW is the longest running weekly episodic television show in history, and the company's stamp on popular culture runs even a great deal longer into the past than that. No entertainment company has a more complicated relationship with its own history than the WWE.