TNA iMPACT!
- GenreWrestling
- Release Date09/16/2008
- PublisherMidway
- DeveloperMidway
- ESRBT - Teen
Kurt Angle, Sting and A.J. Styles invade the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 in TNA Impact!, Midway's user friendly and beautiful wrestling game. Based on the promotion Total Non-Stop Action Wrestling, it allows you to control various grapplers in a variety of matches as well as embark on a neat story mode. However, despite its good looks and easy to learn controls, numerous glitches and cheap artificial intelligence DDT this game into the mat.
TNA Impact! features great looking wrestlers and easy to learn controls. That is, if you manage to actually grapple the cheap AI.We're also fond of the simple controls that let us mash the face buttons and bust out crazy moves guaranteed to hurt our opponents. It's especially enjoyable during frantic multiplayer player bouts, as we and our friends compete in free-for-alls, tag matches and TNA's ultimate contest, Ultimate X, where everyone attempts to grab a big red X suspended above the ring. The mini game to grab the X is a bit awkward, but knocking each other to the floor is good for a few laughs.
That being said, TNA Impact! isn't championship material, mostly because the computer plays dirty. In any given match, it'll reverse more than 70 percent of our grapples, punches and kicks. Midway sometimes gives us the option of reversing the reversal, but that's not always reliable. What happens is, after destroying the artificial intelligence for several minutes, it'll perform a few reversals and win the match. This ruins the game.
On top of that, there's a bunch of annoying glitches that anger us. During tag matches, our computer-controlled partner will stand on the ring apron while an opponent pins us. In single player bouts, the AI will constantly run into the steel steps and punches sometimes fail to connect while fists that are at least a foot from our heads register. Diving into the ring near a standing opponent will stun them for a bit, it's impossible to pick someone up if they're on their belly and it's hard side-stepping opponents, as their running clotheslines are somehow impossible to avoid. Now factor in the B button, which instructs our character to pin or leave the ring depending on his position, and TNA Impact! becomes the type of game that should have a high blood pressure warning.
A lack of content doesn't help. We know that Midway didn't have the time to program lots of stuff into the game, but it failed to include things we've seen in previous wrestling games, such as a deep move list, multiple weapons (it's chairs only, and you cannot run with one), a visible referee and the ability to battle up and down the entranceway. Even something like blood (which pops up in the 10-year-old Nintendo 64 game WCW vs. NWO World Tour) is absent. Sorry, but us wrestling fans expect a little more from these games.
Story mode is cool, but creating a character eats up one of the game's five slots. You also don't have a lot of moves. If you play Exhibition for a while additional moves become available, but if you jump right into the Story campaign you'll have a bunch of defaults, none of which are viewable. Same goes for entrances, as the game forces you to pick them blindly. Entrance one sounds good, we guess, but only because we love the number one. That's the kind of logic you'll employ while creating someone.
We were inclined to award this game a six out of ten, simply because those four player matches (you can only do two player online, by the way, and it's lag-tastic) are cool, but the irritating AI killed us. We can't play a game that won't let us play, so while Midway did a great job with the controls and the visuals, TNA Impact! is much too sloppy to warrant a purchase, let alone challenge THQ's WWE SmackDown vs Raw franchise.
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