WWF Royal Rumble

Get ready for the WWF Royal Rumble! I am a huge wrestling fan and I was so excited when this game was announced. It originally was released for the Super Nintendo and then a few months later the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis version which we are looking at today was released. It was a follow up to WWF Super WrestleMania and the amount of content that this game added was just staggering.

Wrestling For The Title

There are a ton of game modes on offer in this game. the main single-player mode sees you picking your chosen wrestler and then defeating all other 11 wrestlers to become the WWF Champion. You can also do this in Tag Team mode as well. The other main game mode and the main selling point of WWF Royal Rumble is the Royal Rumble match itself. Here you pick your wrestler and then you need to be the last man standing.

There can be six wrestlers in the ring at once and when one is thrown out over the top rope another enters until the whole roster has been used. I always liked the stat tracking after this match how it tells you when a wrestle entered, how long they lasted and who they eliminated. There are also six-man tag matches, brawls, and exhibition matches for you as well.

More Wrestlers!

The previous game, WWF Super WrestleMania only had eight wrestlers on Sega. In this game, they kicked that number up to 12. All the big stars of the day are here such as Bret Hart, Hulk Hogan, Razor Ramon, The Undertaker, Shawn Michaels, and many more. It is a pretty stacked roster, but if I am being 100 percent honest, I do prefer the roster on the Super Nintendo version just a tad. The wrestlers and the arena are much more colorful this time around. There is no music during matches, but I love the way the Genesis plays each wrestler's theme song as some of them sound really good.

More Moves, More Mayhem!

WWF Royal Rumble is not finished improving on its predecessor just yet! The game also introduced many new moves. You can now do things like a backbreaker, atomic drop, chair shots, chokes, and more. All the wrestlers share the same move set, but they each have their own finishing move which is cool.

I love this game I really do, but there is one area that the Sega version struggles and that is the controls. This is a game that was made to be played with a 6-button controller. Most of the moves are executed via the grapple system. You enter a grapple then you need to mash a certain button as fast as you can. If you have a 6-button controller, each move is given its own button. If you have a 3-button controller you have to mash two at a time! This as I am sure you can guess is very frustrating to do and takes a long time to get used to.

I have always enjoyed WWF Royal Rumble and even now I think that the game is a lot of fun. I do feel that the SNES version is the better game. Not just because of the roster, but because the SNES has a standard 6-button controller. You can still have fun with this game with a 3-button controller, but it takes a great deal of work. Still, if you are a wrestling fan you need to give this one a try.

Pros:

• It has 12 WWF superstars
• The game looks great
• Plenty of new moves to do
• Lots of game modes
• The wrestler's theme music sounds great

Cons:

• Using a 3-button controller is a chore
• I do prefer the SNES roster