Top 10 Worst WWE Games

Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we’re counting down our picks for the 10 Worst WWE Games.

For this list, we’ll be looking at console games that used the old WWF or newer WWE license and Batista Bombed it into a glitchy Video Game hell.

Agree or Disagree? Bolieve or Cena-nuff? Sound off in the comments.

The first WWE game to be released on the Xbox, but the last for its thirteen years on tenure on PC, “WWF RAW” had to undergo a huge change shortly after shipping, when the World Wrestling Federation had to “get the ‘F’ out” and became the “WWE.” Sadly, looking great was all it had going for it. The move sets for each wrestler were boring and sloppily animated, grapples rarely connected and each match took place inside the––by-then––outdated RAW is WAR arena. Plus, the camera angles were constantly at a weird 60 degree angle. RAW had more potential than Cesaro, but was executed like The Fiend’s push.

For some PS titles, like “MGS” and “Crash Bandicoot”, taking a retroactive look will showcase a golden age of video game innovation. For others, like “WWF: In Your House,” not so much. You could be forgiven for believing “WWF Warzone” was the first franchise game of the PS1 era. However, that was actually Acclaim’s third attempt after “WWF WrestleMania: The Arcade Game” and “‘In Your House.” So far removed from the source material that it isn’t even a wrestling game, In Your House like its predecessor, is a photorealistic, Mortal Kombat-inspired fighting sim complete with Fatality-esque Finishers and meta arenas. There are little run-ins of promise, like a decent roster and enhanced commentary, but it never managed to put money in the bank.

Why? That’s literally the only question that anyone had when this was announced. A cross between Twisted Metal and Mad Max, and with no inspiration from actual wrestling, “Crush Hour” was even more removed from the squared circle. In a world where it’s normal for The Rock to jump into his “luxury sports car” despite wearing nothing but his wrestling trunks, players fight other WWE superstars in battle-ready vehicles in order to ‘wrestle’ control of all T.V. networks from Vince McMahon. Still with us? In fairness, it’s actually quite a fun little game… but it’s got barely anything to do with its namesake.

The last in our trifecta of Wrestling Games that took out the wrestling. On this occasion, Stephanie McMahon has been kidnapped, and it’s up to your choice from a rather minute number of four superstars to rescue her, in return for the WWF title. How do you do that, you might ask? Challenge her kidnappers to a Cage match? Hell in a Cell? Nah, you just beat them up. With great difficulty too thanks to a poor depth of field. Yep, this game is a side scroller, ala Streets of Rage, as opposed to a wrestling game, ala everything else in the franchise.

Poor “Battlegrounds.” It had as much chance to be successful as Mick Foley did at finishing a match on top of a Steel Cage. There’s nothing particularly wrong with “‘Battlegrounds,” although there isn’t a lot that’s right with it either. This was essentially developer 2K’s unique way of slowly sliding a project across a metaphorical desk and telling us that ‘the dog ate the rest of their homework.’ The art style is bizarre, and it’s far from a wrestling sim. The most egregious part of Battlegrounds is that it was announced off the heels of 2K’s almost-apologetic promise to overhaul their WWE games division, only to lock most of this one behind an obnoxious amount of microtransactions.

To be fair to “Aftershock,” few people remember the platform that the game ran on, let alone this attempt at mobile sports entertainment. The N-Gage was a shell-shaped handheld console/mobile phone hybrid that intended to rival Nintendo’s Game Boy at the time. The only problem was that it was riddled with problems. As a result, video games that were designed for the N-Gage were likely to have issues by default. “Aftershock” was no exception, as the platform wasn’t strong enough for developers Exient Entertainment to add a Create-a-Wrestler, story mode or any more than 11 wrestlers. That said, there wasn’t much variation in the move-sets, and the animations were sticky too. For 2005, handheld WWE games were just not cutting it.

Oh “2K15” how we had so much hope for you. The plans for this “actual wrestling game” promised a complete overhaul of features, new and improved fighting dynamics, and graphics that would fool you into thinking that you were going to be doused in sweat at any moment. Plus, this was going to be the first WWE game on the then-new generation of consoles. However, those hopes came crashing down faster than Shane McMahon on a SummerSlam set. What we got was just bland. Having delayed launch by a month, the new-gen games were slower and boring despite looking great. The whole feature felt like one step forward, and several german suplexes back.

The “Survivor Series” was a Game Boy Advance title, released as a follow-up to 2002’s “WWE Road to WrestleMania X8”, itself a prequel to “WWE Wrestlemania X8”, released on the GameCube months prior… making this a sequel to a prequel of a game that was itself mediocre. Like its counterparts, this game suffered from a lackluster roster and lacked so many staple features. There’s no Create a Wrestler, or even most of the more exotic match types. The graphics were subpar for a 2004 game too––it’s almost like developers Natsume didn’t learn anything in the 2 years since its previous GBA attempt.

With cross-platform games that are ported for the Nintendo Switch, you know that there are going to be one or two compromises. The quality of the graphics and the framerate are likely to drop slightly. Generally though, most Switch ports can work well. WWE 2K18 isn’t even on the radar of being decent. There were two main issues for this––a huge drop in framerate meant that the wrestlers practically ran backwards through the match. Royal Rumbles, in particular, saw the worst instances of slowdown, since the higher number of superstars on-screen practically froze the game. Secondly, there was a huge deficit in features that had appeared on the PS4 and XBox versions. Slow and broken, WWE 2K18 is the biggest kind of step down.

If there ever was a WWE game that deserved a choke slam, it was this. There are a plethora of YouTube compilations of glitches that speak for themselves. Our particular favourite is this, whereby players are forced to wrestle a ghost. Visually worse and mechanically poorer than previous entries, development did not go smoothly, with series veterans Yukes leaving mid-way through. As a result of the negative reviews, publishers 2K cancelled “WWE 2k21” and piled their efforts into building a new game from the ground up in “2K22.” Somebody really should have called for the bell on this failing series long before now.