It’s been quite a few years since I’ve played a wrestling game, and with my resurgence of watching wrestling, the gift code I was given for WWE 2K25 from a fellow tavern pal came at just the right time. I spent a solid 3 hours immediately creating my own custom superstar down to the attire, entrance theme, videos, poses, etc… about the only thing I didn’t completely customize was the move set and just picked one that matched the style I was trying to play, which was that kind of light heavyweight big move kind of role. Think of it as somewhere between Randy Orton and Kevin Nash/Diesel type of style.
There are multiple different game play options, including MyRise, MyFaction, and Universe. I didn’t have much understanding of which was which so I just chose MyRise and imported my character. Only to find out that I also needed a female character, so I spent a good chunk of time creating a female character as well. I cloned the entrance stuff over from my first character which cut down on a lot of the back and forth. Then I fired up MyRise again and got started.
MyRise is pretty self explanatory and serves as the story mode of the game where your two created characters are coming into the WWE draft through various means such as leaving MMA, coming from a rival promotion, etc… You get the option to choose to play as either your male or female created character as the primary focus of the story. Throughout the story, you’ll encounter decision points that will impact some of the various scenarios you’re put in and will close off certain pathways based on your decisions. The goal, it seems like, is to encourage multiple play throughs to unlock all the unlockables but also the various differences in the story line.
My first play through was awesome. The high level premise is that former NXT superstars have decided to mutiny against the WWE and take over the company by recruiting, not only the former and current NXT superstars, but also some main roster talent that came through NXT itself like Bailey and Kevin Owens. I played as the male character and because of my decisions, we ended up doing things like resurfacing the nWo, taking over the NXT Unity Tag Titles and more. I’ll keep the spoilers away as I really enjoyed the story arc and how it progressed as it unfolded. I worked with various current superstars such as Drew McIntyre, Charlotte Flair, Rhea Ripley, and Cody Rhodes, while also unlocking a path where I worked with some legends such as Diamond Dallas Page and Big Poppa Pump Scott Steiner. The plot twists and turns kept me entertained and the story came to a satisfying conclusion. So I immediately thought, well lets see what the difference is by playing as my female character.
So I started my second playthrough which allows you to keep your progression in terms of your stats that have increased and entered the WWE draft again. I made different decisions to start the run and, wait, it’s the same story? Yeah, you read that correctly. It’s the same overall story arc with the same plot points, twists, and turns, just some of the more minor details on how you get there have changed. For example, in my first run, we unlocked the nWo to progress the story but in the second one, we took Mutiny head on in their arena. But the end result was the same, the foundation didn’t change, we just reorganized the furniture a little bit. Overall, that was fairly disappointing because they had at least an opportunity to provide a completely different story line for the male vs the female character. In the end, you have to run the whole thing 4 times to unlock everything and, since I’ve never been a completionist in that regard, I said no thank you after the second go around.
I then chose to start the Universe mode and chose a specific superstar (again my created male character because it’s me, so why not), and this time entered in the universe as a wrestler for both the Raw and Smackdown brands. This had a lot of appeal to me in that you can kind of craft your narrative a bit more in who you challenge, the types of matches you might be in, when to challenge for a championship/defend a title, etc… However, I felt that this mode was lacking a lot of depth in that it never seemed to follow any sort of real structure. I’d get thrown into really weird random matches for awhile, then I’d develop beef with a specific wrestler which would last for a few episodes, then sometimes just disappear. Also, the promos that would sometimes occur due to the “Rival actions” options in the game were weird to me. It was basically a cutscene involving you and others where you’d walk into the ring and cut a promo. You’d even be shown talking into a mic in the ring, with the opponent responding, but there was just no audio. Occasionally the crowd might react or the announcers might add some color, but it just felt like a big swing and a miss to watch and I found myself removing those options as I progressed due to it. I could see a custom character not having a voice actor, but they had a voice actor for the MyRise lines and even the main superstars that would also appear in these didn’t have any lines. Strange…
The highlights of this are definitely the PLEs that occur throughout the year, but even they felt incorrect as a whole. I eventually made my way into holding both brands heavyweight championships, but I wouldn’t always get scheduled for a title defense at the PLEs which was shocking. At one of them, after I had one the first of my titles, I didn’t even defend the title or go against who I as feuding with, they threw me in some early card match against someone from NXT which I wasn’t even a part of that show. It makes me wonder if there’s something to do with the amount of time you’ve been in the universe as my character had only been in for months at that time. But this never truly changed even as I made my way all the way to Wrestlemania holding both titles you’d expect I’d at least defend one of them, potentially both since it is a two night affair. Nope, I was 3rd match on night 1 and it wasn’t even a title defense. That was disappointing as a whole.
The highlight of the universe play was the Royal Rumble where I entered in at number 1 (oof) and had to battle my way through the match. There’s definitely some ways to cheese the match as you can kind of easily just chuck people out of the ring even if they are at full health which was a nice throw back to Royal Rumble on SNES. That’s how I kept winning that as a child was just, wrestler enters, grapple, heavy throw to the ropes, they are gone. Same thing kind of applies here. So I chose the “Can’t play as nose tackle in Tecmo Bowl” approach and made it so I could only manually throw people out of the ring. This made it a much more satisfying match as it’s significantly harder to do that and often times I had to rely on other NPCs to help eliminate people. This was especially true when Andre the Giant entered late in the match and I was already beat up pretty badly. In the end, I couldn’t last and was eliminated by Jacob Fatu and Bron Breakker.
The final mode that was available was MyFaction which seems to be kind of a deck builder type game where you open packs of cards to build your team and then they go through various challenges such as going through the Performance Center and more. This mode probably has the most dynamicness to it in that you have to meet certain criteria on your cards to enter into specific challenges so you can’t just always choose your best cards, but by the time I reached this mode, I was feeling rather finished with the game and so I didn’t go too deeply down it. I could end up returning to it if I feel the itch to play some wrestling, but I feel more than satisfied with my time spent in WWE 2K25. Is it a game that I would recommend to the masses? Probably not, but if you’re a wrestling fan and want to enjoy a solid game, it’s worth checking it out.