This is the best wrestling game for the Nintendo 64, however it is highly overated in many ways....
WWF No Mercy uses the basic AKI engine. There are strong grapples and weak grapples, same goes for strong strikes and weak strikes. How hard your press the button determines if you get a strong or weak move. You have a meter that uses different colors to show your wrestler’s status: red meaning that you’re “on fire”, green meaning that you’re normal and blue meaning that you’re in danger. Once your meter is at its peak you get a special which allows you to do your special move. I found that the gameplay was pretty simple. However I also found that it was hard to reverse and that the gameplay was slow and dated.
The graphics are probably the game’s worst feature. They’re blocky, not smooth at all. It just screams “N64” and it wasn’t very revolutionary at all. The only good part about the graphics is that the CAWs look like standard wrestlers.
The roster in this game is fantastic. It has everyone from the 2000 WWF days. It has a few unlockable characters that can be unlocked by doing storylines in story mode or simply completing the Royal Rumble.
The story mode is great yet challenging. No, not challenging, hard. It’s set up where as you have a bunch of storylines based on you getting a certain belt. Such as WWF Title or Women’s Title or etc. You have to go through all of the paths to get 100 percent. The one thing that kills me about the story mode in this game is that in some matches you have to win them. In SmackDown: Here Comes the Pain, if you lost a match you’d just lose superstar points or whatever. You’d go on with the consequences of losing and they never forced you to win anything. In No Mercy there are simply some parts that you have to win that are really frustrating at times. Especially the handicap matches or the triple threat matches. This game’s story mode is not easy.
One of the main reasons that the game has a cult fanbase is the games customization. You could do things like a battle royal first blood match or other crazy things in the like. That and the fact that it’s easy to mod with Gamesharks and is a big hit in the ROM and MODing community, unlike any of the Gamecube series of games.
The CAW mode is not complicated at all. You can buy moves, outfits, and other things in the SmackDown Mall to equip to your CAW. One of the things that I liked about this game is that the CAW mode was simple, although it didn’t have much detail as say, some of the newer games; it was still not complicated and easy for anyone to just pick up and do.
In conclusion, this is the must see game mainly just to understand what everyone else is talking about. It’s not perfect but it is a great game for anyone with a Nintendo 64 and a taste for wrestling to pick up.