

Other minor enhancements this year include more tired animations and visual expressions when your wrestler’s stamina is low (though I usually turn stamina off because I think there are already too many bars to worry about). It only takes one wrestler to lose for the match to end, so keeping track of both rings is important to consider as you scale the cage, scour for weapons, and springboard between rings. This dynamic plays itself well throughout the fight, making you think strategically as you decide which opponents to focus on since there are so many to keep track of. Two teams - either 3v3 or 4v4 - fight each other with staggered entries, meaning there are periods where one team is a man down, effectively turning it into a temporary handicap match. Just like its real-life counterpart, it features two rings joined side-by-side with a steel cage encapsulating both. The new WarGames match type, which has been highly requested by fans, makes a strong debut in this year’s installment too. But if you flick up on the right stick at the right time, mimicking how a wrestler literally kicks out, you can get out of a pin in situations where the button-mashing mechanic would have made that impossible. The more damaged your wrestler is, the smaller and faster this zone becomes. Getting out of a pin typically means having to mash a button to fill up a circle, but the new timed kick-out mechanic has you try to hit a hot zone as it moves left and right on a meter. One major gameplay change is the addition of an optional timed kick-out meter, which surprisingly feels more intuitive than the default setting. Wrestlers have once again an unlimited number of reversals, so fights are more about input skill instead of saving up reversal stock. Light and heavy attacks can still be stringed together for short combos, the vitality meter is divided into green and red recoverable segments, and it’s still tough to stop an opponent’s onslaught unless you have the proper timing for a block, dodge, reversal, or combo breaker. Sustaining the grapple The new intuitive timed kick-out mechanic is highly recommended.īy and large, WWE 2K23 unapologetically copies the gameplay system from last year’s installment, so if you’ve played WWE 2K22, you’ll feel right at home here. That said, this year’s offering does enough with the 2K Showcase and provides enough improvements across its many modes to maintain the standard of its predecessor. WWE 2K23 fits in this latter category, with WWE 2K22 having already made the necessary course correction the year before by skipping over the planned release of WWE 2K21 so that the franchise could recover from the botch that was WWE 2K20.

#TEGAN NOX WWE 2K23 SERIES#
The way this has worked historically is in cycles, where the series comes out with one game that has a clear overhaul in terms of graphics or mechanics so that the next few games or so can coast along with minor updates and tweaks. Whether made by 2K or THQ, the modern WWE series is essentially a string of fighting games treated like an annualized sports franchise.
