Legends of Wrestling tries to mix the gameplay up, by trying to combine action with a grapple system. While there is quite a few moves, a lot of characters don't have all their signature moves. The game, unfortunately, can be played with just a couple of basic moves since the AI is so poor. The one aspect that somewhat saves the system is the combo and counter system. At the top of the screen is an indicator that will appear marked with green and red areas. The green area is where you want to hit the appropriate button when the cursor moves in front of it, in order to counter a move or chain a combination.

In order to get full access to the game, you will have to play through the Career mode, which takes any wrestler, or one you have created, through each region to win the the title. As you progress, new characters and moves will open up, but this leads back to the AI issues once again. Since it's so dumb, it's quite a drag to have to play through the lengthy career mode. The one incentive to mix things up is that your popularity will go up faster. Once your popularity is full, you get a chance at a title.

If there is anything within Legends of Wrestling that is redeeming, it's the create a wrestler mode. You have plenty of freedom yet plenty of restrictions. There are a lot of things to customize, from the various ways a character looks to the moves that they can do. What is limiting is in some cases the choices to the designs are really limited, although the attributes provide plenty of customization. Overall though, there's plenty of freedom here to work with. This is also a good place to check out which moves the standard wrestlers have, what they look like, and how to execute them.

With how other wrestling games look these days, it's surprising to see how poorly the graphics of Legends of Wrestling are. The models are pretty low quality and the rings are pretty bland. To top if off there's an option to toggle the blood on. Although when it's on, it just splatters everywhere, which looks pretty funny. Along with the poor visuals is also the poor collision detection, which has you either missing your opponent or passing right through them. Even the camera is shoddy in a lot of spots. This can be witnessed especially when there are multiple wrestlers, the camera pulls out to a somewhat awkward angle.

Even worse is the audio. For the most part you get a bunch of grunts and some hit sound effects. But the selection is repetitive and there isn't much of a reaction from the crowd. The audio is completely stale and it's a shame that none of the voice acting, what little there is, is done by the actual person that is being portrayed. Each character does have their own intro theme song although even that is pretty poor quality.

In the end, Legends of Wrestling turns out to be a pretty stale wrestling game with plenty of key icons missing in the history of wrestling. Acclaim is working fast to release a sequel. Let's hope that they fix the issues that plagued this one. There are far better wrestling games out there, and the only appeal to this game would be to play as a wrestler that isn't available in other games. This trade off isn't worth it and neither is this game.