Beast Wrestler - Quickie review

Well, reviews were lacking a bit, so I have a quickie this time around.

I'll talk about Beast Wrestler, one of the various games brough by Telenet Japan for the Sega Genesis. Telenet brought some games with Wolfteam such as Final Zone, Sol Deace, El Viento and Ernest Evans; most of them are good, but a few of them are bad and Beast Wrestler is one of them.

Basically, great beasts are fighting each other in a large ring and they do it by wresting. The 1-player story mode (Or Career Mode if you like) gets you into the fray as you buy your beast from a merchant and you become its manager as you train it to become the Dragon Warrior (No relation to the NES RPG games). First you must win the regional tournament that pits you against other beasts and then you fight at the main event to obtain the title of Dragon Warrior. Yeah, that's all there is to it to the story.

The gameplay... well, let's just say it could use more variety. With the D-pad you move your beast around the ring. A button lets you throw punches, B is for the tail whip and C is for your special attack, which is active when you see an A symbol on your side of the screen. Depending of the beast you've chosen (This goes when fighting vs the CPU or a friend), it has a set number of LP, which indicates your endurance and SP, which can give you an idea how long will it take for you to get your special attack. When you grapple your opponent, you have the option of biting its head off or squeeze with your tail. If you catch it from behind, you can use a body slam, although it's hard to do that since your enemy moves away to prevent you from slamming its ass to the canvas. :S

Where it suffers the most is when you grapple. You don't have many options to begin with and even when you develop your monster on story mode, you're not gonna get more, which sucks giant ass. You're stuck with the biting and tail crush and while you can squash your opponent or give him a headlock while they're down, those are all the moves you have available. By current standards of wrestling games, Beast Wrestler is sorely lacking in this deparment.

The graphics are okay, for the most part. The beasts are detailed enough and at ringside you can look at the crowd as they cheer on during the fight, although they're pretty small (Hey, you're like Godzilla after all). The music isn't bad, but there isn't much variety on it; nothing memorable, really. And the versus mode suffers from boredomitis, since with the limited repetoire of moves can only do so much damage and it can take a good while before you get the Life Spheres of one of the beasts into red, meaning it's a step away or two being beaten. It takes a lot of effort just to reduce one part of the life bar and more often than not either player will win by decision depending on how much damage you did, but you don't really get to see how much. You'll turn it off after a round or midway through and that's all the 'fun' you're gonna have.

At best, Beast Wrestler is mediocre. There isn't much to write home about for this game and lo, it gets a 5/10. If you want real wrestling, try some of the NES games like Tecmo Pro Wrestling or the older Wrestlemania games. Beast Wrestler isn't really worth your time.