Backyard Wrestling: Don't Try This at Home

Added November 23rd, 2003 by Rishi

Introduction:

Every console has its share of wrestling titles, although in this case, Eidos Interactive has taken wrestling and placed it into a different environment, the “backyard”. I wasn’t sure what to expect from Backyard Wrestling: Don’t try this at Home. Although I did feel that it would be similar to other games on the Xbox like WWE Raw 2, but more ruthless and bloody. Having played the game, I found Backyard Wrestling failed to live up to past wrestling game’s I had seen.

It was not a serious wrestling title and did not leave any lasting impression. While there were good parts to the game, like being able to create your own character and the vast amounts of weapons, the game lacked depth. During gameplay I found technical issues, for example, the CPU character would get stuck in some places and also many graphical problems.

Gameplay:

Backyard Wrestling did not feel like a wrestling game to me, more so it played like a fighter with the added feature of weapons. Apart from the game not following the gameplay of other wrestling titles, the speed was insane, of course the action should be fast paced, but not to this extent. The main objective of the game is to punch, kick, and slam your opponent until their life bar becomes empty; at this point they are “knocked out”. The life bar is setup like a fighting game, certain moves take off a certain amount of hit points. One thing I really hate about this game is that a wrestler can throw a weapon at you and it will almost act as a homing missile, it seems that the object thrown will track you down and can rarely be blocked. The problem with this is that one wrestler is able to keep throwing weapons at you hitting you back onto the ground which is very annoying.

On the other hand the game does include some good wrestling moves, unfortunately only a hand full of the moves are actually realistic, the rest of the moves would be impossible to do, and therefore the game is too unrealistic for me. I found that the A.I. was very predictable; it usually did the same combination of moves; kick, punch, then pick you up, do a grab move and then start to throw weapons at you. The only way to survive is to keep kicking and punching till the opponent is “punch drunk” which means they can no longer move for about 8 seconds, during this time you can pull off one of your powerful moves.

I did like the amount of weapons I had to choose from to beat my opponent silly, steel polls, tables, car doors, wooden planks, and other bits junk. Apart from the weapons acting as homing missiles once thrown, they were quite realistic in terms on the amount of relative damage each one inflicted. However I could not see how a basketball could inflict any damage on a wrestler when thrown from a couple of meters away. I liked how they weapons would break after a few hits and disappear to prevent someone of repetitively hitting you with one large steel poll throughout the whole round.

Wrestlers can also climb up ladders, onto tables and other objects. Once on top of a ladder, it was amazing how the wrestler could jump off it without receiving any damage, yet would get hurt from a basketball being thrown at him/her.

All the weapons and ledges are nice features to the game, but if only more time had been put into making them more realistic would have enhanced game experience.

As for character selection here are some the game includes:

Evil Dead, Rude Boy, Shaggy 2 Dope, Violent J, MDogg20, Monoxide, Sabu.

The selection isn’t very large and many will be disappointed by this. A nice touch would have been to give each of the wrestler different stats to make the game more interesting. There is also a Create-A-Wrestler mode, which in no way matches up to character creation on games like WWE Raw 2. Unfortunately players are only able to choose from a small selection of pre-made body styles to use for a wrestler. Each body has a quite a few costumes to choose from, and after making your character, you only find that is just looks similar to one of the already pre-made wrestlers which came with the game itself, which really just defeats the point.

The most creative part of Backyard Wrestling is the Talk Show mode. Your chosen wrestler will battle it out at different locations. After each stage you will be presented with another clip of the talk show which is covering the topic of backyard wrestling. The other modes are exhibition and some side games like survival mode.

Graphics:

When you think it can’t get any worse, it does. Backyard Wrestling graphically looks like it was originally meant for the PS2. The character models of Backyard Wrestling compared to character models of other wrestling titles like WWE2 is appalling, Backyard Wrestling seems like a step backwards in terms of graphics, it just doesn’t come close to what the Xbox is capable of. The game lacks detail and the jagged looking character really spoils the last chance of enjoying the game. At least the environments have had some attention to detail and are somewhat better than the character models; however it’s hardly anything to make me amazed. Mostly the environments are pretty open with plenty of weapons and other objects around.

The cut scenes are nice, but then again, I can’t think of any game that comes out nowadays which has a poor cut scene.

There are just too many glitches that should have been fixed up before Backyard Wrestling was released, I don’t see how their beta-testers missed out on how the character models sometimes go half way through a wall, which is another disappointing aspect of the game.

Audio:

There are around 30 tracks of punk, rap and rock. You are able to switch through the selection of tracks using the white button on the controller during gameplay, which I think is essential for any game coming onto the market now. The selection of music sure does add to the madness of Backyard Wrestling.
Fortunately, Paradox did do something right by allowing the use of custom soundtracks. I found the sound effects to be bare and standard. I would have thought there would have been a different sound that every weapon made when smashing your opponent over the head with it, but I was wrong.

Controls:

The controls took me some time to get the hang of; it would have been wise if they had included an in-game tutorial of how to do the moves like on Dead or Alive 3.

Left Thumb Stick- Move around
Right Thumb Stick- N/A
Dpad- Can be used grab moves.
A- Attack 2
B- Grab
Y- Pick up a Weapon
X- Attack 1
Triggers- Punch/Kick

Replay:

I don’t think the Backyard Wrestling disc will ever enter my Xbox again, the game is just inferior to other wrestling titles which I have played. I think many gamers would find that after completing the Talk Show mode the game would become extremely repetitive, mostly due to the A.I. being so predictable.

If this game supported Xbox Live it would have had a much better chance at being a success, able to play against others around the world and having a league table is what gamers want. The game could have been made more interesting if it supported up to 4 players rather than 2, you would then be able to have tag team battles and handicap matches with all your friends.

Summary:

Backyard Wrestling attempts to take a totally different approach on a market which is already lead by games such as WWE Raw 2, the idea is golden, but it has not been put to good use, the game could have been better in so many ways of gameplay, audio and graphics.

I respect Eidos for trying out the idea, but sadly the only people I see playing this game for longer than a week is hardcore wrestling fans, for anyone else I say rent it instead if you really must.