WWE Battlegrounds: Awful, just awful in every way

Every now and then PlayStation Plus members get a game thrown at them for "free" with their PS Plus membership that seems a bit out of the ordinary for a "free" offering. Normally the games we get are decent games that are relatively old, but still pretty decent or great games. Every now and then they will throw a game at us this is relatively new and when this happens, you need to be suspicious.

I was suspicious when they chucked Battlegrounds at us so close to its actual release date and I only had to play the game for about an hour before I realized that my suspicions were absolutely correct.

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I have in the past enjoyed wrestling games that were both licensed and unlicensed and therefore had made up characters rather than ones that existed in real wrestling organizations. One thing I didn't like about wrestling games is when they went down the path of making the controls too difficult and this is something that has bothered me about most sports games over the past decade. Just because the controller has 22 buttons doesn't mean you have to use ALL of them. Some of my favorite games on modern-day systems only use 4 or 6 of them. Hell, one of my favorite games of all time - a game called Inside, only used 2 of them!

So when WWE Battlegrounds promised to be a return to "arcade style" play I was actually kind of excited about this.

Boy did I ever get let down.

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For one thing when you fire up the game the very first time there is 4 screens of "agreements" that no one will read but you have to scroll all the way to the bottom of before it will let you proceed. It is filled with lawyer talk and this is not a great way to start out a game. After I finally got past all of that the above screen is what I was greeted with and when your main menu has a "store" option this is not a good sign.

You start the game out with the ability to play as virtually no one. You can't select HHH, Ric Flair, Hulk Hogan, Sting, Undertaker, etc until you unlock them.

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_{It's about 3-4 USD to unlock any of the major well-known wrestlers}

There are 2 ways to unlock the characters in the game: You can grind for currency by doing matches, or you can PAY FOR THEM using real money.

I suppose this explains all the lawyer stuff at the beginning that was there so that pissed off parents can't sue 2Kfor this abomination of a cash-grab game.

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The big and dumb fun that is in fact simplistic (which is what I wanted) is totally ruined by the "grind" to unlock characters is incredibly monotonous and I had to fight 3 bouts in order to acquire enough in-game currency to unlock ONE of them. This took around an hour and I was already kind of over the gameplay. I'm not going to dump days and days into this game so that I can unlock all the heroes. When I did finally save up enough to unlock a wrestler that I had actually even heard of, which was Kane, it was extremely disappointing to find out that aside from his special moves he operates exactly the same as the no-name character I had been using in order to unlock him and my opponent was always the same person because I haven't unlocked any other wrestlers.

This game had some potential after the disastrous release that WWE 2K20 was but instead 2K decided that a great way to win back some customers was to release a fun game that could only be fun if you were to participate in micro-transactions and I can't believe that any game company would still go down this very dangerous path. One of the quickest ways to get me to turn off a game forever is to make the game transaction-oriented. In fact, I think I am part of a growing populous that will turn their back on a game studio forever if they release a game like this.

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_{Oh! Look at how the prices are marked down so much!}

I don't know how many people have been duped into spending real-world money on this game, but I'm not going to be one of them.