No, WWE 2K22 isn’t close to being the complete atrocity that was WWE 2K20. The major niggling hindrances here consist of the middle rope occasionally snagging on characters, some striking attacks having strange hitboxes, and, at the time of this writing, connecting to the Image Uploader Tool is erratic at best. Otherwise, WWE 2K22 is a fully functioning, feature-rich wrestling game. With that in mind, that means that it can be judged properly as a new WWE wrestling game only, and on those merits it’s fundamentally solid, with its only major problems stemming from the fact that it’s, well, a WWE game.
Watching a real-life WWE match rarely holds a candle to playing a WWE video game, where the balance of wrestling to “sports entertainment” is back where it should be, with ample time and opportunity for matches to go the distance. By contrast, it’s now become an unexpected treat to get a match that goes more than two minutes on WWE’s TV shows, as well as one that doesn’t end in DQ and interference. As for matches between two wrestlers who haven’t faced each other in the last three weeks, those are as rare as red diamonds. The games have long been a safe haven against those tendencies, but that’s starting to change, and WWE 2K22 reveals the worst aspects of the shows creeping in around the edges.
For right now, though, the structural integrity of the thing remains rock-solid. Developer Visual Concepts has gone back to the drawing board with the combat, and what they’ve come up with has injected a nice dose of fighting-game mechanics into the grappling gameplay. It’s absolute harmony in one-on-one matches, but the more complex match types get a bit messy, with multiple buttons required to perform simple actions—picking up weapons, setting up ladders, lifting an opponent onto a table—and the game’s targeting system sometimes not knowing where it should focus attention. It’s a little shaggy in those instances, but not to the point of breaking the game, and surmounting the learning curve means that a lot of wrestling’s most coordinated and complex maneuvers can be busted out without much fuss.
All of the common permutations of wrestling matches that one can imagine are here by default, and most of ones that aren’t you can create, within reason (sorry, no barbed wire matched). The same generally goes for just about any wrestlers who aren’t in the current roster. (There will eventually be over 200 officially available wrestlers to choose from.) One of the first things that I did within a half hour of starting the game was to give Brock Lesnar his new Minnesota Farmboy persona, and it took all of 30 seconds. As always, the create-a-wrestler modes are unimpeachable in terms of volume, depth, and ease of customization, with the only main omission this time around being a way to upload custom theme songs.
But the sad irony should go lost on no one that WWE has released so many wrestlers in the last nine months that a third of this game’s roster is no longer with the company, with a good 10 to 15 of them signed to AEW alone. Two of them, William Regal and Swerve, showed up on AEW’s Revolution pay-per-view event on the exact day that my review code landed in my inbox, and yet, turn on this game and there’s William Regal, NXT general manager.
Indeed, even as fast as things do move in wrestling, WWE’s own scorched-earth, erratic approach to its shows and its talent works against the game, in terms of trying to tailor it to anything resembling either the current WWE status quo or its own hallowed past. WWE 2K22’s Superstar Mode, which celebrates the career of Rey Mysterio, is executed with panache. It allows players to battle through some of the star’s greatest matches, and will prompt them to execute the big memorable moves within those matches at just the right time. But because there are so many wrestlers that are no longer with the company—or that the company didn’t pony up likeness rights for—there’s a huge chunk of time missing from Rey Mysterio’s star-making period from the peak of WCW (read: 1997) up through 2007, skipping an absolutely incredible Wrestlemania title match against Randy Orton and Kurt Angle in the process.
The game’s most in-depth mode, MyRise, is an enjoyable campaign, despite some lamentable voice performances from anyone who’s not an established WWE talent, but it’s also the place that feels the most disquieting. One of the very first things you see in MyRise is a massive banner that reads: “You’re no longer a pro wrestler, you’re a WWE Superstar.” Putting aside the larger, ongoing insanity of that effort—WWE has been trying to divorce itself of the word “wrestling” for years now, to no avail—so much of the spoken and unspoken dialogue in this mode pertains to branding and catchphrases, to the point that even the most earnest moments feel like an advertisement for a mobile game that doesn’t exist. Even as big and absurd as pro wrestling can be, it’s not beyond a measure of honesty, but it’s hard to know that here.
Probably the greatest encapsulation of all that WWE 2K22 is—WWE as a whole, really—is in the MyGM mode, a mainstay feature that allows players to book WWE’s weekly shows for money and ratings. This is theoretically a place to do some good—say, to team Rhea Ripley up with Shotzi Blackheart and let Keith Lee cut a promo week after week, and without the godawful Bearcat gimmick. At one point I thought that my first order of business would be to book Shinsuke Nakamura on the main roster like the superstar that he deserves to be.
But you can’t. Not really. There’s only 10 people who move the needle in WWE, and winning at MyGM means booking those same exact people, and exactly how WWE wants them to be booked. And thus, the mode is just kind of a drag, forcing the player to run the same five matches ad nauseam. It’s been a long-standing complaint that WWE doesn’t know how to make new stars. WWE 2K22 is still a fine wrestling game, but the most frustratingly realistic thing about it is just how hard it is to make new stars here too.
This game was reviewed using a review code provided by Finn Partners.
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