My first few minutes of Chikara: Action Arcade Wrestling are not off to a great start. When I enter into the tutorial on PC, the directions it gives me are for the controller keybindings – and you can’t look those up without quitting back to the main menu. And for some reason, despite the game’s entirely average arcade graphics, mine was racked by freezes and frame stutters through the entirety of the tutorial that made it almost unplayable, and this was on a Desktop PC with a modern graphics card and sixteen gigs of RAM.
As I’ve never watched WWE or other entertainment wrestling shows, I can’t attest to how accurate the portrayals of wrestling are, or whether there were any over references, but in color and tone it seemed like a neon-ified version of those prime time tv staples. Loading screens depict human, not cgi, wrestles engaged in various moves and poses, which was a bit of a weird juxtaposition – but then again, staring at close ups of the low-res wrestling characters you get to play as wouldn’t have been much better either.
The gameplay is relatively straightforward – you can move your boxer up, down, left, right, and you have a mixture of regular attacks, heavy attacks, special moves, and blocks you can employ. The combat’s straightforward and doesn’t contain any surprises, and when I was able to play through the mysterious frame stuttering, I pulled off most of the combos I attempted, when I wasn’t distracted by the 2010 level graphics of the fighting characters and their hilarious royalty-free wrestler names. You do at least get to choose from a wide array of characters and have the option of customizing your own wrestler – I’ll always appreciate customization options.
Chikara: Action Arcade Wrestling is one of the first efforts of the VICO Game Studio to be released exclusively for Microsoft systems. I say this at the end because it feels that is still a rough, unpolished XBOX arcade game that was ported over to PC without a lot of thought or care.The gameplay issues that I described still persisted after post-release hotfixes. If you need to play every wrestling game there is, I guess this exists, but otherwise I would recommend waiting for a few patches at least before giving this your time or your money.
5/10
Here is the Chikara: Action Arcade Wrestling Video:
CHIKARA: Action Arcade Wrestling (CAAW) is now available on Steam.
Steam Review
I'm a huge nerd and PC gamer. I have my own rig and recording set up, and while I'm mostly a fan of RPG's like Fallout: New Vegas and the Witcher 3, I also play RTS's, shooters, narrative games, etc.
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