I looked at WCW Nitro last time, and now I’m looking at the sequel, WCW/NWO Thunder. I hope the development team learned from Nitro’s mistakes and made this game better. I hope I won’t be too disappointed.
Inland Productions made both Nitro and Thunder, so the games will look good. Nitro was the first wrestling game they made, so maybe they’ll do better this time. I’m really hoping because I know the WCW wrestling games have been good until I stumbled across the last one.
Thunder has a bigger roster than Nitro and a longer development time. THQ delayed Nitro, so both games were released close together. Let’s see what the game has to offer.
TLDR: I only liked the inclusion of TV footage for cutscenes. I hated everything else.
Narrative
There is no story in this game. There are three gauntlet matches that you can create a story around, but that is it. I shouldn’t be surprised here.
Gameplay
This game has the same control scheme as WCW Nitro. If you liked the controls in Nitro, then you might like Thunder. I thought they were terrible and didn’t have the best time with this game. I kept trying to like the game, but there wasn’t anything to hold onto.
This is awful. I called the controls abysmal when I played Nitro, and they somehow got worse. The game felt too fast, and the moves just happened. The button combinations are the same as Nitro, but so much worse.
Amazingly, the developers made the engine worse from one game to the next. I was expecting things to be the same or better, but everything feels worse. Just moving your wrestler around the ring feels terrible.
You can do grapple moves in this game. Three of them, to be exact. There is also an interesting test of strength mechanic, which is just a variation of the lock-up and made me feel like I was playing one of the LJN-published wrestling games on the SNES. I’m struggling to find something nice to say.
Thunder has more game modes than Nitro, which is kind of like saying the infectious disease I had yesterday has spread to other parts of my body. Here is the list:
- 10 Match World Heavyweight
- 7 Match US Heavyweight
- 5 Match TV Title
- Exhibition Match
- 2 Player Vs.
- 1 Player Tag Team
- 2 Player Vs. Tag Team
- 1 Player Battle Royal
- 2 Player Battle Royal
- 1 Player Cage Match
- 2 Player Cage Match
Good on the developers for trying to improve the game by adding more things to do. Unfortunately, the underlying gameplay is awful, and having more awful doesn’t improve it. They tried some things, but they weren’t good.
There is a huge roster in this game. So, that is a good thing. If you subject yourself to this game, you can unlock other wrestlers. This might have been fun in 1999, but I can’t imagine people wanting to do it now.
The more I played this game, the worse things got. There are a lot of moves in the game, but they are the same for every wrestler. Special and Signature moves also exist. Everything is more situational.
There are weapons in the game. They awkwardly hover on the outside of the ring, waiting for you to pick them up. I don’t understand why they exist.
The roster looks like it is broken up into factions, or at least that seems to have been the idea. The wrestlers are given a little faction marker for:
- NWO Holywood
- NWO Wolfpack
- WCW
- The Flock or Raven’s Flock
- Four Horseman
Do these factions play a role in the game? No, of course, they don’t. Why would you think that?
My favorite part of this game is the manual. Like many manuals for wrestling games, there is a page with a toll-free number for ordering merchandise. It advertises a bunch of NWO Wolfpack stuff, and a small part of me wanted to call and see if I would still order it. Then I remembered that I didn’t care enough to do that.
Overall, this is a terrible game. The gameplay is awful, the controls are unresponsive, and it is more of the bad things from WCW Nitro. This is probably why I always saw the game on store shelves in the early 2000s.
Visuals
I think Nitro looks better than this game. That is saying something because I thought Nitro was one of the better-looking wrestling games I’ve played to this point. Something happened to Thunder because I think the graphics have gotten worse overall.
The short promos on the character select screen are still here, which is good. They don’t do much to make the game more enjoyable, but I’m glad they’re there. They don’t look as good as the promos in WCW Nitro, which probably should’ve told me what I was in for.
I don’t know what happened to this game. The graphics look worse than WCW Nitro. This is pretty shocking because you would expect the development team to get better from one game to the next.
The Steel Cage looks pretty good. The ring and crowd are great, and there are short cutscenes with footage of the wrestlers walking to the ring. These are taken from the WCW Thunder TV show and look pretty good. I wish more wrestling games would do this.
Overall, the graphics look a little worse, and the character models don’t look as good. It is so weird that this game looks worse than Nitro. I would’ve thought that Inland Productions would’ve gotten better at this, but no, they got worse.
6/10. This game is worse than WCW Nitro and The Simpsons Wrestling. The controls and graphics have gotten worse. It’s an awful game.
Pros
- Good Graphics
- Large Roster
- Lots of Game Modes
Cons
- Horrible controls
- Terrible Gameplay
- No Story
Conclusion
This is one of the worst games I’ve ever played. It is that bad. The controls are terrible, which ruined the gameplay and made everything else irrelevant. I have no idea how Inland Productions got worse at this following Nitro.
There is probably a story behind this. THQ had delayed WCW Nitro, and they should’ve delayed this game. At some point, I would like to dig deeper into both THQ and Inland Productions. I think ideas for other projects is the best thing to come from these two games.
I think it might be time for me to play a good wrestling game. Thunder was awful. The best part of the game had to be the use of TV footage in the game. Everything else was disappointing. At the end of the day, the developers tried their best to make a good game. Unfortunately, they made WCW/NWO Thunder instead.