That foundation of trash remains intact for WWE 2K18, I’ve played 2K17 recently enough to remember how that game feels and I cannot name one positive change made in the intervening year.Īll the little problems I had with the last game are back in WWE 2K18, like the wildly inconsistent targeting that almost ruins foreign objects (and completely ruins your standard moveset), the way you need to hit your opponents with at least three finishers before they’ll stay down, or the fiddly controls that require minute accuracy in order to execute the move you wanted to perform. It’s another example of the game splitting the difference between “fake” and “real,” a mechanic that will theoretically replicate the necessary story beats in a match that is ostensibly presented as a legitimate athletic competition. In theory, this is so your opponent can get some offense in once your reversals are used up and vice versa. All your moves pull from the stamina meter and all your counters pull from the reversal meter. The 2K games have never been “fun” to play, mostly because the wrestling centers around stamina & reversal meters, in order to approximate the pacing of a wrestling match you might see on television.
The 2K WWE games have never really been my cup of tea, but WWE 2K18 might be the most player-unfriendly release this series has ever produced. So where does WWE 2K18 fit? Does it take WWE canon as gospel? Is it a sports management-style game where you’re putting on a fictional show? WWE 2K18 is both and neither, fully embracing the identity crisis that has thus defined the 2K installments in the form of its M圜areer and WWE Universe modes…while doing little to fix the other problems inherent to the series thus far.Īhh, I’ve tipped my hand with that “I hate playing this game” crack. That extra stuff only serves to fill the void between “real” and “fake”-the only two things that really matter in wrestling.
You can just watch Monday Night Raw or SmackDown Live and feel like you had a relatively complete experience, you won’t miss anything if you don’t follow all the wrestlers on Twitter or whatever. But there’s also everything in between: social media posts, reality shows, media appearances, cameos by WWE wrestlers in other wrestling promotions, comic books, even spy novels! All of this detritus is of dubious continuity, but at least it’s all ancillary. There are two extremes: our real world and the fictional world that exists on WWE-produced television programming. Everything related to wrestling exists on a separate level of reality.
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