Finally a wrestling game that's fun to play.
Prior to this game, the only wrestling games that I thought were worth a damn were Mat Mania (aka Exciting Hour) and WWF Superstars both for the arcade and Def Jam Vendetta for the Gamecube.
I've tried the new WWE games, most recently WWE Smackdown 2011 and never liked them - they just seemed off and not much fun.
WWE All Stars on the other hand, now here's a fun wrestling game that doesn't seem to take itself to seriously and thankfully only half of the roster is made up of the new breed of wrestlers who for the most part I have no idea (or desire to learn) who they are.
The classic roster includes my favourites like Ultimate Warrior, Roddy Piper and Macho Man.
But what this game has that sets it apart from most, is a pretty robust character creator that allows you to create pretty much anyone you can think of. I made an Iron Man character and while you can't quite get everything perfect, it's pretty close and a blast to play. You're limited as to what moves you can assign the characters, you just pick a set from an existing wrestler but it terms of manipulating the character image, it's pretty sweet.
And if you look around the internet, you'll find sites where people have made customer characters (look for CAW - create a wrestler) and you'll find a slew of custom made characters.
There are also some DLC characters and if you don't like the idea of paying for characters who probably should have been in the game to begin with, you can just create them yourself.
The mechanics are solid, you can pick your moves easily and it never feels like the moves are random and you're just watching the computer play.
While I didn't like the art style when I first saw screenshots of the game, they've grown on me and it all fits. The characters are pretty much nothing more than cartoon characters and it seems appropriate that the game reflects them as such.
While I'm not one for collecting trophies, I find myself trying to get all the trophies for this game. It's not that there's not much to do but it just seems fun to try things like winning a match in under 2 minutes or winning a matching without grappling.
Only went online a few times and was able to find matches pretty easily although a few matches crapped out and there was a bit of slowdown when there were four players onscreen.
A minor quibble is the load times in the game seem a bit much all things considered. As well, the game sometimes bogs down when in game creator mode and it has crashed my machine once and messed up my created character (it made parts invisible but it corrected itself after a few reloads).
A more major quibble is that when you take the disc out and reload it later after having played another game, the game caches data - it loads itself again and this takes a few minutes - this is very annoying but it is what it is. Hopefully a patch will correct the problem.