After doing well with the WCW vs nWo games, AKI and THQ managed to get the big wrestling license: WWF. Focusing on the big WrestleMania event, AKI brought over everything they learned from their previous games and improved upon it, making fights feel eventful without dragging on too long, and providing a decent amount of modes and features, including a basic create-a-wrestler.

The main wrestlers have their intros, as well as a little, very compressed FMV for them, and they all look fine from a distance. When the camera gets closer, however, the wrestlers look like they’re constructed from parts poorly stuck together, and the faces look like masks, especially so in the case of The Rock, who has his eyebrow raised expression permanently pasted on the front of his face.

WrestleMania features a decent singleplayer mode – with you picking a partner for tag matches to mix things up – and a good amount of modes for multiplayer. One mild annoyance is that the female wrestlers are all locked away at the start, and the only way to create a female wrestler is to unlock one and copy them. Overall though, this is where wrestling games started to improve a lot.

Fun

Attitude’s beat-’em-up style combos have been dropped in favour of a more simple tap of the action button and analogue pad, but this simplistic approach does provide hardcore fans with a more satisfying fight.

Oliver Hurley, N64 Magazine #36. Review Score: 90%

Remake or remaster?

I’m not sure what current wrestling games are like.

Official ways to get the game.

There is no official way to get WWF WrestleMania 2000.