Review: If I cry "uncle," will you make it stop.
The bar for portable wrestling titles has been set high. The Fire Pro Wrestling games have established the series as the international heavyweight champion of portable wrestling. The combatants may be fictitious, but the fighting system is fathoms deeper than anything we've ever seen before. With Legends of Wrestling II, the portable version of the marginal console wrestling game, Acclaim is throwing their hat in the proverbial ring. However, after playing LOWII, it seems like they should be throwing in the towel.
The biggest problem with Legends of Wrestling II lies in its presentation. The wrestlers are so small and the color palette is so limited that you just can't tell what is going on. The problem gets exponentially worse with every additional wrestler you put on the screen. Even with how bad the wrestlers look, the animations are even worse. Rowdy Roddy Piper looks like some disco reject jerking across the floor as you try to move him across the screen. Not that you can really tell that it's him.
These visual problems make the game nearly impossible to play effectively. The timing of the entire control scheme is thrown off by the inconsistent animations. With the problems that are in place, it takes more luck to perform a move than it takes skill. This is really too bad because with a cast of forty classic wrestlers and a decent handful of match types, Legends of Wrestling II had a lot of potential. This one should have been left in the oven another six months. Maybe then it would have been a playable game.
