ECW Hardcore Revolution

Acclaim has once again produced a bad wrestling game. It is hardly any different than attitude and still has the entire negatives attitude had.

ECW HR is too much like attitude to make anyone who has attitude to get it. The option menus, moves, and graphics are exactly alike attitude. What worse is the bad commentary and the poor collection detection. The control is lousy. The wrestlers move like robots rather than people and don’t move smoothly.

The graphics have slightly been improved. You can easily recognize some of the wrestlers. The animation is better. There are still moves that jump from one scene to another. Wrestlers are more realistic as they bruise, scar, and get umps on their head.
Wrestlers move more fluid and speed of each brawler's movements are faster. The thing is the faster speed makes performing moves more difficult than usual. Matches move faster meaning you have to perform moves more quickly to get them out before you get hit. This leads to some serious button mashing. You will button mash more than try to perform the wrestlers move so you might actually do something. The crowds look fake and repeat the same movements after a while. They also start chanting but that only gets annoying. In this game there are 5 arenas rather than one in attitude. They all look a like and just have different logos and adds. Each of the arenas offers no advantage over the other.

The barbed wire bout is a big disappointment. It could have been great but turns out to be a total waste of time. When you are thrown to the wall you stay there for a second and fall to the ground. Getting pushed into the wall doesn’t even make you bleed more. Big, big disappointment.

You have the ability to create your own wrestler but it is exactly the same as attitude’s. The outfits and skins are the same. The theme music hasn’t changed either. Ecw’s music comes from real bands. They must have spent a fortune in getting the rights but there aren’t too many songs. After playing for a while they will get repetitive. They’re many ring options to choose from. You can wrestle in three-way Dances, cage matches, battle royals, and lumberjack bouts.

Ecw turns out to be a decent attempt at a wrestling game. Games like wrestlemania 2000 and smackdown have raised the genre and ecw fails to keep up. There are better games to get on the dreamcast than ecw. But it is still a good game despite its similarities to attitude.