As a wrestling and video game fan, from the surface, Wrestlequest appears like it truly is a match made in heaven. With a sweet 16-bit graphic style and a playable rating on the Steam Deck, this was a no brainer for me when I saw that it went on sale.
You start off as the Muchacho Man Randy Santos, a thinly veiled reference to Macho Man Randy Savage, complete with his gravely voice, similar sayings, and patented Oh Si! trademark. You start to build out your wrestling career as you take on challenge after challenge to try to get into your first promotion, the BEW.
The gameplay is a fairly straight-forward RPG style game with all of the tropes that you’d expect. There’s the battles with enemies, which take place in the ring, and you have to use your regular attacks, gimmicks (aka special moves), and various items in order to battle whatever enemies the game throws at you. It’s highly dependent on the zone that you are in as to who you will face, but you’ll start to see repeated sprites with slight color variations as you get deeper into the game. You will also start to figure out patterns of moves or combinations of moves as you continue playing that just help you get through the battles a little quicker.
The story will bounce back and forth between Muchacho Man and Brink Logan, modeled after Bret “Hitman” Hart, even down to some of his in game voice acting “I am not a Hitman” and references to the Hart family dynasty in the form of Pa’s wrestling dungeon.
Along the way, you’ll meet a cast of characters that you can recruit into your stable, or party, that will bring along different skills and abilities. Some are more bruiser type fighters such as The Brooter (Hulk Hogan), others more crowd control / healing types (Barbae), and others with more specialty skills such as stealing (Toy Box Jimmy). They all have pros and cons to them, but I started to have characters I preferred to have in my party and characters I didn’t, just based on how the game is balanced. Nuke, for example, is probably the best all around character to get you through battles quickly as his Salvo gimmick not only hits every enemy, but for multiple hits. Even though it’s at a diminished total power, it’s still one of the more useful gimmicks and has a really low AP cost to it.
There are tons of side quests that you’ll come across as you’re marching along the main storyline and these quests will take you through the rest of the world where you’ll meet some of the wrestling legends themselves such as Jake “The Snake” Roberts, Hawk and Animal from Legion of Doom/Road Warriors, and even the British Bulldog. Having grown up on wrestling, I definitely had a solid understanding of who everyone was, even when they threw characters like Junkyard Dog and Koko B. Ware at you. There were a couple of references that I didn’t fully understand, but none of them are so wild that they detract from the story if you don’t recognize the person. The game does a great job of getting you up to speed on why they are legendary in their own right.
The thing I enjoyed most about the game was the various statues throughout the toy room which included some of the aforementioned characters, but also some like Luna Vachon. Every time I came across one of them, it was a nice nod to another wrestling great and I wish there’d been more individual ones as opposed to the 4 or so Macho Man ones. The game definitely feels like a love letter to Macho Man Randy Savage.
For some of the larger, more boss style battles, you’ll get to setup your intro as you walk to the stage for the match. This was definitely an interesting option that I felt was vastly underused throughout the game. Overall, there were maybe 10 or so times that the intro sequence was used (maybe a few more), but given that you’ll battle tons of enemies and even a bunch of main story / legends, I felt there could have been a bit more usage of these.
While I definitely had some great times playing the game, and I felt that the first half was really tight and engaging, around the 20 hour mark the game started to really kind of wear thin on me. At that point, things started becoming fairly repetitive which knocked down the highlights of the early part of the game and ratcheted up the annoyances of the various mechanics. Case in point, there’s a driving mini game that was fine-ish the first time I played it. There were definitely some learning curves into how the mini game was best played, but later in the game you’ll have to repeat this same mini game several times. Each getting entirely more frustrating than the previous especially when I kept hitting a bug that forced my vehicle up off the top of the screen. This meant I was hitting obstacles before I could even see them and I ended up just skipping them if I didn’t pass the first time. Don’t get me started on the moving paths in the Parts Unknown… that part almost got me to call it a day!
The voice acting, while well done, is extremely limited and gets old very quickly when you start to realize that every gimmick you use triggers it. When there’s only 2 or 3 things the characters say, you get tired of hearing “You skipped leg day” half the time you’re playing.
Another couple of mild annoyances were that the game would regularly turn off sprinting mode after a scene change or after using a table spot token. It would also force reset your party to specific characters from time to time instead of being a situation where you get a chance to replace your party with whoever was required. Neither of these are deal breakers, but definitely things that you’ll scoff at when you just set up your party exactly how you wanted, only to have it reset a few moments later to have to repeat the process.
The latter half of the game felt more about just kind of running around and doing routine quests of “go here, talk to this person, go here, talk to that person” with a few random battles strewn within. There were whole stretches of quests where you didn’t even really battle anyone and just kind of plodded the story along. As a whole, I think they could have cut this game in half and still had a really cohesive story that was fun and engaging.
Unfortunately for me, at the end, I was full on in “wrap it up” mode and ended up turning on some of the game boosts like max damage, auto pin, and the match speed multiplier. I wouldn’t be surprised if that ended up saving several hours off the back end and I still cashed in at around the 40 hour mark. It’s a neat game that has it’s moments, but unless you’re like a die hard wrestling fan, its probably one that you could skip.