games / Reviews
WWE 2K25 (Switch 2) Review
Image Credit: WWE
Loading...Another few years and another review of a WWE game by me. The last game in this series I looked at was WWE 2K23, the John Cena one. I gave it a fairly decent score and went on my way. I didn’t get a chance to review last year’s game but here I am with this year’s and it’s…fine? I dunno, it’s hard to gauge these thinge which I’ll get into below.
WWE 2K25 is the latest version of the long-running WWE franchise. Y’all know what this is, the yearly update with roster changes and a few improvements. I can’t possibly delve into this game completely, but I’ll talk about the more noticeable things.
First, the controls. Here is an excerpt from my 2K23 review:
”At it is fairly straightforward, square is light attacks, X is heavy attacks, circle is used to grab/Irish whip, and triangle is the counter/block button. L2 is used for running, L1 is used for picking up stuff/getting a weapon under the ring. R1 is used to climb stuff, like ladders, but is also a dodge move to get out of the way of attacks. R2 is kind of the situational button, you’ll use it to do your signature, finisher, payback and submission attacks, depending on what face button you use.”
That is exactly the same system used in 2K25, only since I’m on the Switch 2, replace Square with Y, and X with B, and so on.
However, some attacks still don’t work 100% right. Trying to do a Running Springboard attack almost never worked for me. The directions are basically, “Press ZL to run, and press Y just before hitting the ropes”. Yeah, good luck with that. The timing on it is so tight, you’re liable to just keep bouncing off the ropes, like I did. After 10 minutes, I eventually got it right enough to pass the tutorial. A later move in the tutorial is the Apron Dive. The basic instruction is thus, “Move towards the ropes and press R to get on the APRON from inside the ring. While on the APRON, hold ZL and press Y or B.” Sounds simple, right? Except the instruction is omitting a key detail: when on the apron and holding ZL, you actually have to be running and THEN press either Y or B. If you’re just holding ZL, you’ll do a different move and it won’t count.
Here is why I bring this up: the game never actually told me what I was doing wrong. It never came up with a more detailed tutorial, interactive (step-by-step) tutorial, or even a video of the move being done. I shouldn’t have to go hunting around on Youtube to see how the move is done. Once I saw a video of it, I thought “Oh, that’s easy”, and I did it the first try, once I realized what the game was actually asking me what to do. There’s still a lot in this game, tutorial and general information-wise that isn’t explained well. If this was the first game that 2K made after the Yuke’s switch-over that might be forgivable. But this is now the…fifth game in the franchise under the Visual Concepts umbrella and it’s a little annoying.
There are three big “story” modes in this game: MyRise, Showcase and The Island. I’ll get into them below:
MyRise is the traditional “You create a character, and start at the lowest point in the WWE roster, to eventually become the champion” thing, that is always in these games. However, this iteration seems…really dated. Like, you’ll have behind the scenes segments that look like they’re from a PS2 game, with you having fairly surface level choices and you having to stare at a make-believe phone UI a lot, reading badly written texts from other wrestlers. The actual impactful choices are few and far between and overall the story is just a letdown.
ShowcaseI is the cover athlete’s story mode and this one is a bit wonky. So, the cover wrestler is Roman Reigns, he’s not my favorite, but he’s had a perfectly serviceable career and is one of their big stars, so “sure”. However, the showcase mode isn’t about him, but it’s about “The Bloodline”, the families of Anoa’i and Maivia, with all their wrestling descendents. So, in this mode, you’ll play a match as The Headshrinkers, Rocky Maivia, Umaga, The Usos, etc. In the 17 matches in the showcase, guess how many you play as Roman Reigns? Two. And one of those is just a “choose who you want to play as”, so technically only one, if you want to use someone else.
Of the 17 matches, 6 of them are “fantasy” matches, where it’s a hypothetical team-up. The Wild Samoans vs. The Dudley Boyz, or 3-Minute Warning vs. The Authors of Pain. These are a bit silly, but I get the point. The other 11 matches is where silly transitions to stupid.
One of the matches is The Headshrinkers vs. The Steiner Brothers at Wrestlemania IX. However, you change the finish by having the Headshrinkers win over the Steiners. Or another match has you playing as Umaga against John Cena at New Year’s Revolution 2007. In reality, Cena won the match but here, you triumph over Cena. Of the 11 matches, 5 are normal and the other 6 are these “Rewriting History” nonsense.
WHY DO THIS AT ALL?! Isn’t there any history or footage of Tamina winning a match, or Rikishi winning one? Couldn’t they have just use a match where Naomi actually won against another wrestler cleanly, instead of this fake “Naomi triumphed over Bayley in the Super Showdown 2020”, when she actually didn’t? It is utterly bewildering, but considering the 2023 Showcase was all about beating the hell out of John Cena, logical consistency isn’t something I can ask for out of this mode.
The depressing thing about this Showcase mode is that it actually starts off great. It’s a very scripted quasi-tutorial match that is initially between Cody Rhodes & Roman Reigns, with Solo interfering. Then John Cena comes out to make the save and you play as him for a few moves. Then The Rock comes out, then Seth Rollins, then The Undertaker, it is like a fever dream of wrestlers and such. The intro also does this amazing thing where it occasionally has a first person perspective mode, of you, as Roman (most of the time) doing moves against others, notably the spear. To my knowledge, Visual Concepts were the ones who pioneered the “first-person football” mode from NFL2K5, why not have a “first-person wrestler” mode in a WWE game? I gather, it would probably be costly to do and/or look really janky in spot but at least it would legitimately be something new and interesting for the franchise.
Lastly, there is The Island mode, and “Yikes” says a lot about it. I haven’t played a NBA2K game in a long time but I know that franchise has “The City”, and “The Island” is the WWE version of it. The basic concept is you are invited to Roman Reigns island, and are trying to get a WWE contract. Unlike the MyRise mode, you actually can walk around here, the Island is full of shops, quests, and other wrestlers to talk to and/or occasionally fight. Sadly, Scarlett Johansson isn’t here but maybe in the sequel she’ll show up.
The Island is basically a hub system with some light questing and such to do. Various wrestlers will give you quests for you to do, Austin Theory wants you to repair The Undertaker’s urn, or Rey Mysterio wants your help about another famous masked wrestler. The quests net you experience for you created wrestler, VC (money to buy stuff) and cosmetic parts/banners, etc.
There are two problems with this mode that kind of kill the enjoyment for me. Firstly, there’s no map or objective markers to find stuff. There is an objective marker if you get close enough to see it, but if you’re not, good luck trying to find a particular person. Having a map that shows where you are, in relation to other quest people or objects, would be immensely helpful.
The second issue is the load times. The Island is technically online, you’ll occasionally see other CAW’s running around but it’s not full of them. To go from one area to another, you’ll hit a 10 to 15 second load time. This happens every time you transition from outdoors to indoors or vice versa. These loading times kind of kill the momentum of this mode. It’s especially galling since I have a digital version, since all versions are the physical version, including the “Key Card” version. I’d have rather made The Island a single player/local version and only have it be optional to go online or not.
Speaking of the “online” part of the game, it seems barely functional, and that’s me being generous. Every time I booted the game up, it either had to pull a system update patch from the Switch 2 servers, or else an internal patch from within the game. This wasn’t a one or two time event, this happened literally every time. The MyGM mode is online now, but I routinely got kicked out of it, due to network issues. MyFaction went the same way, I got literally booted out of the mode as I was opening the deluxe edition card packs. Online matches were reasonably OK but getting into one is a pretty barren exercise, there are not a lot of people playing online.
The last two things I’ll mention are, I think, the two new match types here: Underground and Bloodline Rules. Bloodline Rules is just a normal match but when your signature meter is filled up, you can call in someone to help put a beat down on your enemy. They can do the same though, so it becomes a bit of a back and forth of when to call them and such. You don’t get to call in specific people though, it just seems random. Sometimes it makes sense, like HBK calling in HHH for help, but his other ally was Santos Escobar. To my knowledge, HBK and Santos haven’t been allies, unless Santos somehow ended up in the last iteration of DX.
Underground is a bit of a more interesting variant. It’s basically a match but without any ropes. So you can’t do springboards or stuff like there. There are still ring posts but you can’t actually climb them to do anything. There’s no pinfalls or countouts in this match type but DQ’s still count. The only way to win is via submission or else by completely draining the other person’s health and knocking them out. It’s not revolutionary or anything but it feels a bit more like an actual “wrestling” match than some of the more goofy types they have.
