I know some of you cats love the first one, but I never played it.

I've got no love for the sequel. Took me 20 minutes of bullshit cut scenes and buying pants get to my first fight. The fight moved slow, and the control isn't nearly as responsive as I've grown to love from fighters by Namco or Capcom.

That said, its easily better than most other wrestling games I've played, and the ability to make your own character and have him look and talk like an idiot is fun. You can customize your fighting style, build skills, learn new moves from Henry Rollins. The fighting just seemed overly complex with adding grabs, holds, a 'blaze' meter, and crowd introduced weapons to the usual punch/kick/block stuff. I'll be the last to call complexity in a fighting game a bad thing (as many, many of them turn out to be too similar), but fights seem a little to scripted in the "press this button, now that button, and now this button' way that doesn't leave any of the choices up to me. The lack of depth in the punch/kick moves make for some problematic gameplay for anyone who ins't used to wrestling games. With such an expansive cross promotional push to include the hiphop community directly into a game, you'd think they'd mainstream it a bit more, especially with extra push from EA, who dominate the industry as a 3rd party player.

The soundtrack is about what you'd expect from an EA title. After cramming emo and pop-punk down your throat in Burnout 3, now I'm being force fed whatever Def Jam wants me to like, as evidenced by Al's previous post about Comp's inclusion.

Sorry, just not my kind of game. I'm sending it back to Gamefly and getting the new X-Men