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WWE Road to Wrestlemania X8 Review - GBA

With many wrestling games on the market today, and definitely more than enough WWE games, why would one journey over to the hand-held platform? If you're unlucky enough to only have a GBA, then you're going to find it hard to enjoy what THQ have to offer with their latest wrestling title for the GBA: WWE Road to Wrestlemania X8. Some GBA games these days can hold their own with the big consoles, but WWE Road to Wrestlemania X8 is lacking quite a few details that would make this game an enjoyable one.

Gameplay

The menu layout is very user friendly. You have your Singleplayer, Multiplayer, Data and Options. From the singleplayer you can choose the 2 different game modes: Challenge and Exhibition. The different match modes in the Exhibition mode of WWE Road to Wrestlemania X8 include your 'one match', an Ironman match, a '3 stages of hell' match, and a team battle. The 'one match' and Ironman game types have a variety of different match types such as Fatal 4 way, tag, handicap and lumberjack. The 'one match' mode even has a cage match battle. You can also select between 7 different rings to wrestle in, including Raw, Smackdown, Wrestlemania and other famous pay-per-view events. The Challenge mode has 5 different challenges: Championship - where you fight for the WWE Belts, King of the Ring - a knockout competition, Royal Rumble - an all in brawl, Gauntlet - survival of the fittest, and Pay Per View where you can design your very own matches. Competing in the main 4 with different characters will unlock goodies in the shopzone. This may seem like a very cheap way to reward fans, as there's nothing you can do with them except look at them.

In the Data menu, you get a list of the superstars in the game (a whole 15 of them!), the history of who's held the belts recently, the high scores in your gauntlet matches, and the shopzone (as mentioned above). The shopzone actually seems like a good idea that was never properly completed. There are quite a few items to unlock however, and it's not hard to find a full list of unlockables on the internet. If you actually play through the game and unlock everything, you could be in for quite a few hours of gameplay.

The interface is as plain as it can be to make sure it takes up a minimal amount of the small screen. All it has is the wrestlers' name, and his special bar. Once the bar is full of blue, it will glow and this is when you can perform your special move. The wrestlers all have their signature moves of 2002, and are actually modelled quite well. Once performing your special move, the bar will go orange and then deplete. If you keep it up too (continued next page)