Impact Wrestling Battle Hero

Fight with your favorit Impact Wrestling battle and destroy enemies.

Features:

- Easy and Simple to play.
- Nice-looking graphics 3-D.
- Cool skill design and effect.
- A lot of challenges and stages.
- Classic sound created excitement for players.

The extra time in the oven hasn't made a real hero on pinning down and beating into submission the problems that kept the series debut from being the tour de force game enthusiasts had hoped for. Staying faithful to the machismo drama and intense man-pummeling action of battle just isn't enough when the game so readily degenerates into repetitive and frustrating button mashing. Context-sensitive control issues and bastardly enemy AI also take a lot of wind out of the game's testosterone-powered sails.

After being approached by rival wrestlers who threaten him to throw the match, he decides to curb-stomp his opponents anyway. Ticked off by the victory, Suicide's rivals brutally attack him after the match, beating him within an inch of death and leaving him bleeding in a Tijuana alley. With his memory fuzzy and his face reconstructed by plastic surgeons, Suicide gets back into the ring south of the border and begins his ascent back up the circuit ladder. The story itself is pretty straightforward drama fare that plays out through a mix of static sequences and nicely animated cutscenes. Not everyone will enjoy being railroaded into playing a canned story as a single preset character rather than starting a custom wrestler from scratch--a fairly standard option that's noticeably absent here. However, the visuals both in and out of the ring are crisp, and the hard rock soundtrack does a good job of keeping the adrenaline flowing.

As your ripped foes get tougher, their aggressiveness and stamina increase dramatically, and all enemies in general seem to have an uncanny knack for effortlessly pulling off counter moves that turn your own attacks against you. It's a shame that doing the same to them is all but impossible with the inconsistent controls.

Unfortunately, far too many of the attacks are context sensitive and rely on proper positioning and timing to be wielded efficiently, which is problematic when you're in the middle of a frantic bout against a tough opponent who is quickly adapting to your attack patterns. Some buttons also produce different variations on key attacks depending on which directional button you're hitting or whether you hold the left shoulder button. Since your main attacks rely on punches, kicks, or grapples, fending off the aggressive AI during intense matches tends to readily devolve into repeating the same handful of quick, easy-to-execute attacks.

This port of a now two-year-old game could have been a good opportunity to tighten up some of the gameplay issues from the console release. Instead, it's largely untouched, making it a weak contender among other portable games.