Video games are how I got into professional wrestling. I never went through the professional wrestling phase as a young boy of the 90s or anything like that. It wasn’t till college that I played a WWE game and was introduced to the likes of John Cena & Triple H. This month the free game was WWE 2K24, so I decided to check back in on the franchise.

The gameplay hasn’t changed much since that game I played back in college. You have your light and strong attacks along with grapples. They do feel a bit more intuitive than I remember the older games being. After a little time with the controls, I could pull off a variety of different moves from simple punch combos to throwing opponents off the top rope. The counter system is something I never 100% mastered. Some moves give you a generous counter window, others are blink, and you miss it. There were a few times I felt I hit the counter, but I was apparently half a second too slow. Other times the counter prompt appears at a strange time during an opponent’s attack, so it’s impossible to expect someone to hit those. Not every move is counterable, which makes sense from a gameplay standpoint, but there were a few attacks that felt like they should have a counter option that didn’t, usually the big throws or carries. The AI can be a bit cheap on certain occasions. There were a couple fights where they just beat me down and I never got a chance to fight back.

The graphics are nothing to scoff at. The arenas look top notch, the crowd NPCs aren’t just 2D cutouts. You can create custom wrestlers and like any game with custom character interacting with real people, there’s always that chance they stick out like a sore thumb, I’m thinking of The Godfather the Game. WWE 2K24 is one of the first games where this isn’t really an issue. Your custom wrestlers look like they belong in scenes with real WWE wrestlers, they don’t stick out with that less detailed, artificial skin look that often plagues custom characters. There’s also a plethora of customization options for your wrestlers. Earlier this year I played AEW Wrestling, and I was disappointed at how limited its customization options were. They were a bit more realistic, but less fun. With WWE 2K24, you can create wrestlers that look like your standard dude in tights to medieval knights to astronauts. My two main wrestlers were a early 1900s English pugilist and a gothy witch. On top of that you can customize their entrance, arenas, and championship belts. The one thing you can’t create easily is new tag teams.

There’re several different modes offered in this game. There’s the typical rookie to pro story that sees you climbing up through the WWE ranks, there’s the Universe mode where you manage the WWE enterprise by scheduling fights, creating rivalries and allies, and wrestling in matches. This mode is the only spot I found where you can create custom tag teams, but those teams don’t transfer over to the main campaign. There’s also a GM mode, I didn’t mess with that any. I expect it is like a football manager sim where you just use spreadsheets to manage your stable.

The mode I played through completely was the Legends of Wrestlemania series. It is the 40th anniversary of Wrestlemania so this mode was all about playing through the biggest moments in Wrestlemania history. It’s all framed as a sort of interactive documentary. The match starts with a little history on that particular year’s Wrestlemania, then you get to play through it. The goal is not to simply drop your opponent as quickly as possible. You are given objectives to complete, like performing a certain move on your opponent, doing these lets you play through the real match punch for punch. There’s cutscenes that switch between the in-game engine and clips from the actual TV broadcast. The clips are undercut by the fact that sometimes the screen is blurred out to hide WWF logos, corporate logos, or faces of people. Most of the refs in older matches are blurred out and you can recognize JR from his cowboy hat, but his face is blurred out. I don’t know a lot about consent laws, but I would imagine they all signed something when they were hired on that allowed the WWE to use their image for whatever purposes they see fit.

They got a couple of tired old wrestlers to come in and give quick interviews, like Hulk Hogan and Steve Austin, again giving everything that documentary feel. I get it’s their thing, but I kinda wish with these interviews is that they would drop the kayfabe a bit to talk about how these fights came to be. Especially with the matches from the 80s, I don’t care about their “storylines”, give me some real history. It was fun to see the evolution of wrestling through these matches, from the unnaturally buff 80s dudes in bright colors that slowly transition from the rad 90s guys into the gritty Attitude era of the late 90s-early 2000s to the kid-friendly, more buttoned-down modern era. You go from small auditoriums with a boxing arena to the large sports stadiums filled with jumbotrons and pyros. The game does unevenly represent each era. You spend several matches in the 80s, then skip through most of the 90s and 2000s until they get to the late 2010s. I was surprised that I never played a John Cena Wrestlemania match given he was the face of the company for most of the 2000s.

Given this was a 2K sports game, I highly expected this game to be filthy with microtransactions and monetization schemes. I figured all of the classic wrestlers that everyone knows would be locked behind pay walls and DLC packs. Luckily, they are actually unlocked by completing challenges in the Wrestlemania mode. You can unlock Hulk Hogan, Andre the Giant, Macho Man, Rowdy Roddy Piper, etc, without spending a dime. There are some wrestlers you have to buy using ‘coins’. You can earn coins by playing matches, but you can also buy them as the game’s premium currency. Still the wrestlers locked behind the coins are either B-list famous wrestlers or alternate versions of already unlocked wrestlers.

All in all, this was a fun entry in the wrestling franchise. The variety of game modes lets you play a part in every aspect of the WWE. There’s a bevy of customization options. Matches are fun and the controls are easier to learn than they were in past iterations. If you are a fan of wrestling games and the roster of WWE wrestlers, I can recommend this game, especially while it’s free on PS Plus this month.