Being a fan of fighting games both 2D and 3D, I’ve come in contact with a wide array of professionally developed titles that give you stunning graphics, smooth, responsive game play and enough depth to satisfy even the most particular gamer’s tastes. Naturally, I would have an inclination towards wrestling games. Different wrestlers to choose from with different strengths and weaknesses and physical one-on-one melee combat. Unfortunately for myself and the rest of gamerdom the developers of this particular genre (at least in the U.S.) seem to miss the boat time and time again. While this sore spot is by no means a new one, each successive title serves only to aggravate an already festering wound. Day of Reckoning 2 is just one more example of a wrestling game that may be successful and well received by wrestling fans, but falls well short of what I would consider worth playing. I’d even consider Day of Reckoning 2 (at least on the Game Cube) to be a significant step backwards from the wrestling titles available today.

At the risk of starting a console debate war, I’m going to venture an opinion that some of the issues have to do with the limitations of the Game Cube console. The first place this game takes a dive is in the audio department. Obviously disc capacity is an issue on the Cube, but it’s never been quite apparent to me how much of an issue it really was. In Wrestlemania 21 for the XBox, the characters in the story mode all come with digitized voices that add that level of realism for which one looks. In DoR2 for the Game Cube, instead of voice-overs you get a box full of text to go along with the poorly animated characters. If this wasn’t bad enough, play the game and make note of the lame way the developers reuse sound effects in odd places. In one example, a deep, resounding punch sound effect is used when characters clap their hands. Short cuts like this abound.

The story mode starts out with the WWE championship being thrown up into the air because of a conflicting call during the championship match. You get to see the match on the jumbo-tron. At least I think that’s what it’s supposed to be. It’s hard to tell what you’re seeing because the video is scaled up and blurred to such an extent that it’s almost indecipherable. I can’t be completely sure, but this might be another example of where the lack of capacity caused the developers to skimp on much needed content. You’ll notice this is a theme throughout this review, but please bear with me.

The only other thing that may be a side effect of the platform’s limitations is the lack of customization available when you create your Superstar. There is customization, just not to the same degree as in Wrestlemania 21 or other games. There are only a handful of body types, none of which make very convincing wrestlers. For Christ’s sake, the Japanese guy from Tokyo has round eyes, a bulky upper body build and a brown comb-over. If we ignore the fact that our no name wrestler starts out basically engaged to one of the hottest chicks in the WWE, we’re still left with this utter lack of realism. After I was done, I didn’t feel like I had made a badass wrestler itching for a chance at the title. I felt like I made my high school physics teacher.

I’ll grant that if you try really hard you can probably come up with a reasonable pattern for a wrestler. In my case, the options simply didn’t exist to make my kind of wrestler. But supposing you make a decent looking wrestler, what’s next? Not much in my opinion, at least not as much as is available in Wrestlemania 21. You can customize your character’s attributes to a degree, but if you change them too much you’ll wind up creating a physically retarded character. I wanted my character to be quick and strong so I built up those attributes and took away from charisma and endurance. The charisma didn’t seem to matter (like I said you’re already banging the hottest chick there) but the lack of endurance sure as hell did. It makes sense that you’d tire after a while, but in a trivial match where I was beating the piss out of the other guy, I quickly grew more tired than the poor schmuck laid out on the mat. It’s a tad extreme when you perform a grapple and then have to take a ten second break afterwards. Even if you can form a convincing argument that it’s realistic, can it be considered fun? At any rate, the lesson I took away from the experiment was to leave the attribute settings alone and just build a vanilla wrestler so I could at least live through a match without having an asthma attack.

You can customize your guy’s moves, but I’ve never noticed the moves to have any distinguishing effect anyway. Maybe there is and I can’t perceive it, but I think they’re all about the same. Nevertheless, you can customize which moves your guy does even if only to have different animations trigger with each D-pad direction. There aren’t as many moves as Wrestlemania 21…whatever.

That leads us right into game play, which is really the most often bashed aspect of wrestling games when evaluated by gamers. This is not a new topic. These are not new ideas. Wrestling games past and present have suffered from the same basic flaw: lack of depth. We gamers are a sophisticated bunch when it comes to our melee. We can handle it. Imagine us not as stupid cavemen wielding funny looking colorful misshapen clubs (read: controllers). Think of us as intelligent cavemen who have the understanding of the intricacies of the sport of wrestling and the expert hand-eye coordination necessary to influence events in a way not unlike a real wrestling match.

Force the players to work the crowd and get them hyped up before being able to execute the fantastic and awe-inspiring moves we know and love. Let the moves have realistic effects on the person being grappled. Abolish the notion that one D-pad direction is just as good as any other. We want to feel like our button mashing means something. As it is you just need to know when to press the grapple button vice the strike or counter button. If the game were any shallower, it would have one button labeled “play” in all capital letters.

Unfortunately, these are as much issues with Day of Reckoning 2 as they are with the wrestling genre as a whole (barring a few shining exceptions). Even worse, I haven’t seen any signs of it getting any better. If I had to choose, right now, I’d probably consider Wrestlemania 21 the best, but that maybe because of the differences in the consoles. Neither of them are what I’d consider truly fun games, but if you have to have a wrestling game stick with Wrestlemania 21. If you only own a Game Cube, then this is the wrestling game for you!