Fire Pro Wrestling Returns Review

For just $15, you can become a MacMahon-like wrestling tycoon. Spike’s Fire Pro Wrestling Returns is a wrestling game that lets you create everything from rings, referees, logos, and wrestlers to leagues, tournaments, and more. It is one of the deepest games I have ever seen in terms of letting the player set everything up the way he or she wants to, but it is far from the easiest or most entertaining game to play; the controls are a mess.

There are over 300 fighters that can be fully customized, from their names and information to their appearance and fighting styles. This means that there are over 300 fighters in this game that I wouldn’t be able to control well if my life depended on it. The fighting system works very strangely; there is no grapple button. To grapple, players have to make contact with an opponent and then press an attack button with precise timing. Running attacks are virtually impossible to do. I couldn’t figure out how to pick up weapons in a five-minute time span where I mashed every single button and did everything I could think of to pick them up. I gave up.

The creation modes are great, but you will absolutely have to have an online FAQ or genius interpretation of the instruction manual to use them well. As I mentioned, every character can be customized and altered; however there are about a dozen menus that have to be managed in order to do so. The logo creator is particularly difficult to use. It could take up to an hour to create a decent logo with an understanding of the interface, but until you learn the system, you could spend hours fumbling through menus and undoing everything you tried to create. Although the rings can be customized, the crowds move in a pretty repetitive motion and aren’t very interesting at all.

Actually, the graphics aren’t interesting at all. I understand that the 2D sprite style is more akin to other Fire Pro Wrestling games, but this is clearly something that the PS2 is more than capable of. The animation is absolutely terrible, and collision detection is both the reason why attacks never connect and the reason why there is so much clipping. The music is repetitive and, like a lot of other things found in this package, awful. Don’t expect high-quality sound effects, either.

When you see a $15 price tag, you have to expect a $15 product. Fire Pro Wrestling Returns is such a product; it will draw the attention of those hardcore wrestling fans who love to customize their characters and anything else they possibly can. I have met these gamers—one man I met while working in a video game store actually bought memory cards weekly to create more and more characters in his wrestling games. That guy would find an infinite amount of enjoyment here. Everyone else would probably enjoy attempting to shove down as many Big Macs as their $15 can buy without getting sick.