Review: WWE 2K22
It’s pretty telling when the best entry for a particular annual franchise is from decades ago. Whether or not it was 2000’s WWF No Mercy or 2003’s WWE Smackdown! Here Comes the Pain, there’s a good chance whatever your favorite WWE licensed game is, it doesn’t have a number in the name.
Regardless, we hit what was potentially the nadir of the main series with WWE 2K20, which was a glitchy, horrible mess. So bad, apparently, that 2K’s internal developer, Visual Concepts, did the unthinkable and skipped a year for the series. So here we are with WWE 2K22, which they claim hits different, but does it hit different enough?
WWE 2K22 (PC [Reviewed], PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X) Developer: Visual Concepts Publisher: 2K Released: March 10, 2022 MSRP: $59.99 (PC, PS4, Xbox One), $69.99 (PS5, Xbox Series X)
On the surface, we’re looking at exactly the same game. The customization suites feel the same, the UI is still an annoying slog, and it still plays an initially far too shallow playlist of songs at you while you’re interacting. That can be comforting, I suppose. If you’ve played the last half-decade or so of WWE titles, you’re going to feel like you’re slipping into a familiar pair of tights.
However, there has been a lot of work done on the game engine. I would like to preface this by saying that if anyone had asked me what my priorities were for a better WWE game, an upgraded engine would have been somewhere near the bottom. Yes, I’m essentially saying that it feels like WWE 2K22 threw away the baby to play with the bathwater. It still has to convince me to abandon all the custom wrestlers I built up in 2K19 just to make them again here.
Once again, when you look at the cream that rose to the top, the tools for
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