Love/hate #23 Fire Pro Wrestling World

I picked this up during the Christmas sale after it being on my wishlist forever. I'm a big fan of older WWE/F games like Smackdown 2: Know Your Role and Day of Reckoning. Much of my CAW Universe revolved around those two from 2002-present. I have been looking for an alternative,  most likely a PC 2k game, but the most recent edition is apparently a big pile of bugs and only a few of the newer ones are available on Steam. Might pick one up soon to see how they are. I'm currently banned from buying any new games on Steam until I clear my backlog a bit, so here we go.

I knew going in it was quite cartoonish compared to the realism of the current batch of wrestling games. But in cartoon graphics usually there is greater freedom. I was struck by the sheer amount of edit modes and of course I went there first instead of any actual matches! I made my wrestler, the Blacksmith, first, but I took a quick detour to the belt edit and threw together a bunch of titles:

I like the options for 6 man and even 8 man tag titles. In the nWo, only six titles are currently defended (World, Women, Intercontinental (2nd), Hardcore, Cruiserweight and Tag Titles) so more variety is nice.

I threw together a bunch of wrestlers after Blacksmith, mainly to get the 10 custom wrestlers made achievement but also to populate the roster with my usual guys.  I have about 32 between the two Gamecube memroy cards on Day of Reckoning  but there are about 50+  that could be made, mostly classic roster members. The big achievement would be 100 wrestlers created, which is very doable.

Caoi got the inaugural Women's title. Blacksmith got the World title on his second try, losing to one of the premade game wrestlers.

I like teh optiosn for decals for the ring (more edit mode craic) and you can even add mp3 and some other file types for ring music and battle music!

The Royce and Eoghan in Brussels ring.

The CAW mode is really complicated in some  ways. You add 'layers' of clothing and hairstyles etc to create a complete look. That's  why Blacksmith (bottom left in red pants) has a tank top on the front and crop top on the back. I like his Zeus style hair thing.

The victim of the oil explosion looks good,if I can change his hair and trunks black as well he'll  be perfect as Black Attack! but White Attack! doesn't look as impressive...

All in all it's pretty good but the jury is still out. I'll give it a another solid go soon but will juggle this with Yu-Gi-oh! Legacy of the Duelist, very excited to go through the various campaigns in that.