Even though real-life villain Vince McMahon was forced out of the WWE, and under disreputable circumstances, in January of 2024, in terms of the on-screen story, most will tell you the end of the McMahon era creatively was April 7, 2024. That was the day that Roman Reigns’s legendarily tyrannical run as Undisputed Champion came to a righteous end at Wrestlemania 40, at the hands of “The American Nightmare” Cody Rhodes.
It’s now been a year since the WWE has been fully under Paul “Triple H” Levesque’s stewardship, and that time has been marked by dizzying highs, terrifying lows, creamy middles, and more. And once again, 2K’s annual WWE-branded sports release is meant to encapsulate the broad spectrum of professional wrestling promotion at the moment of the game’s development cycle, which appears to target somewhere around fall of 2024.
With WWE 2K25, the spotlight is again on Roman. To the game’s credit, though, it reflects well upon the status quo of the new era of the WWE. As opposed to the days when McMahon’s creative fetishes guided who got to be a main eventer, Roman’s existence at the top of the card is a far more welcome, organic presence here. Yes, he’s the cover boy this year, but in the context of most of the rest of the game, he’s yet another top-tier character in a much wider pantheon of A-list performers who are given ample time to shine. As Cody Rhodes’s theme says upfront, wrestling has more than one royal family, and he must share the spotlight, not just with the current champion, but with members of his own long and legendary family.
Specifically, Showcase Mode starts with the fall of Roman’s empire, then proceeds to tell the story of his Bloodline through a series of fantastical matches. Some are real matches whose histories you can rewrite (letting Yokozuna beat Hulk Hogan, or Umaga beat John Cena), some are pure fantasy (the Dudley Boyz in their prime in a TLC match against the Wild Samoans), and all of them show a deep respect for the Samoan legacy in the WWE. It’s an impressive bit of kayfabe storytelling, with Paul Heyman playing a masterful, scenery-chewing role as the tribal storyteller spinning endlessly captivating fables of the Samoans that came before.
Elsewhere, the MyRise story is a surprisingly twisty angle about an invading faction of NXT wrestlers rebelling about the main roster’s mishandling of their best stars after being called up. There’s a surprising amount of inside baseball at play here, slyly talking around the idea of your custom protagonist coming in from the likes of New Japan or AEW, and playing up some frequent complaints about creative. The biggest flaw, as usual, is some iffy voice acting, from the protagonist as well as the established WWE Superstars thrown into the mix, though some do better than others (Drew McIntyre, in particular, fully understands the assignment). Still, there’s quite a bit of player freedom to approach MyRise with more agency than previous years.
That’s a good thing, since WWE 2K25’s one big misfire is its pseudo-RPG mode, a very real incarnation of Roman’s vaunted Island of Relevancy. The conceit isn’t the worst idea. An open-world techno-Polynesian Disneyland where Roman is essentially the Shang Tsung for a wrestling-based fighting tournament, a la Mortal Kombat, is exactly the kind of over-the-top ridiculousness that pro wrestling excels at. However, the execution feels as gross and mercenary as the still-present MyFaction card game that this series continues to push on players. It’s even worse since the two modes share a currency and, you guessed it, a microtransaction system.
That might be forgivable if the mode felt meaningful, but many of its quests amount to mindless collectathons and cheap visual-novel-style interactions with Superstars. We’ve seen this concept executed with depth and panache in Street Fighter 6 and Tekken 8. In the flowery prose of the WWE’s chief creative officer, WWE 2K25’s Island can’t hold their jock by comparison.
Thankfully, the rest of the game offers a tweak and spitshine to a largely perfected formula you’d expect from a yearly update, with technical chain wrestling returning, intergender matches—something we need more of from the real deal—an all-killer soundtrack for once, and an enormous roster that largely still presents the folks you’ll see running the ropes on Netflix every Monday, which wasn’t even a guarantee the last two years. Despite capitalism rearing its ugly head, WWE 2K25, like the WWE itself, is in a stable place, a leader worth acknowledging.
This game was reviewed with a code provided by fortyseven communications.
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