Surgeon General's Warning: if you suffer from high blood pressure, playing
TNA Impact may be hazardous to your health and to the health of your Xbox 360 controller.
TNA Impact is Midway's answer to THQ's popular series of WWE
Smackdown vs. Raw pro wrestling videogames, but THQ doesn't have much to worry about: while
Impact is more accessible than most
Smackdown titles and has good production values, a skimpy set of features and gameplay modes ensure it will never rise above undercard status.
Oh, and
TNA Impact is often so frustrating you'll want to piledrive your controller through the floor. More on that later.
Founded in 2002, the TNA (Total Nonstop Action) wrestling promotion has always been in the shadow of the WWE powerhouse, lacking the star-power and brand-name recognition of Vince McMahon's outfit. It's not too bad though, featuring some guys who used to be in WWE as well as performers most wrestling fans have heard of, like Sting. TNA also uses a six-sided ring.
TNA Impact features a storyline: at the start of the game, your character, a pro wrestler named Suicide, wins the TNA championship after being told to take a dive. Because he didn't follow orders, Suicide gets worked over by a couple of thugs and is dumped in Mexico with a bad case of amnesia and the need for a new face, seeing as how his current one is all messed up. This is Midway's method of getting you to the character creation screen, where you can put together a new grappler. Unlike
Smackdown vs. Raw, the Create A Wrestler options in
Impact are quite meager, with not much to choose from in the way of body types, facial features, or clothing. You also can't create a lady wrestler;
Impact is a boys-only club.
With his new face in place, Suicide sets out to get back to TNA and discover who set him up.
Impact's plot is dumbly amusing thanks to how all the characters in it take everything 100% seriously, seemingly unaware that pro wrestling is scripted; in wrestling parlance,
Impact is
kayfabe all the way. When Eric Young gets kidnapped and held hostage by LAX partway through the game, he is
really kidnapped by them. No one ever breaks character.
The early stages of
Impact serve as a bit of a tutorial, showing you how the controls work, and to Midway's credit the controls are fairly easy to pick up, with the controller face buttons used to strike, grapple, and perform context-sensitive actions. By holding down the left bumper and pressing the face buttons, you can modify attacks. There are no multi-button/joystick combos to learn in
Impact, so players can jump in and start throwing opponents around the ring right away. For some reason though, you have to furiously wiggle the left analog stick to break pins or shake off the cobwebs after being stunned instead of just mashing a button. It works, but it feels like the stick will break off at any second and in the heat of battle it's easy for your fingers to slip and disrupt the rhythm. Don't be surprised if you hit the controller's guide button a few times and lose a match because of it.
Impact is also a bit picky about the position of your character when you want to perform specific actions: sometimes you'll want to climb a turnbuckle, but because you weren't perfectly positioned you'll slide out of the ring instead. Attempting to grab a downed opponent's leg or arm will often leave you grasping at air because you weren't in quite the right place when you pressed the button. Unlike the more methodical
Smackdown vs. Raw, the action in
Impact is very fast-paced and positioning flubs like this can be costly.
When you
are able to pull off moves in
Impact, they're visceral-looking and very well-animated; if only there were more of them. There just aren't that many different moves in the game, and most of the wrestlers share the same ones. Basically, you'll be doing the same moves over and over, which makes nearly every match feel identical. Additional moves can be unlocked by accumulating style points in matches, but you'll need to grind out lots and lots of exhibition victories to get access to most of the good ones.
Impact also doesn't let you preview moves on the character screen; want to know what the "Angel Wings" look like in action? You'll have to play a match to find out. The same goes for ring intros: pick one at random and hope you like it when you see it for the first time.
Not only is
Impact's move set limited, it also doesn't have certain types of moves, like grapples from behind or tag-team maneuvers. Trying to grasp an opponent from behind leads to an amusing animation of your character sliding around and grappling him from the front. At least the submission holds, where you clutch a limb and do a button-pressing mini-game to inflict more damage or make your enemy tap out, are fun to do.
"Limited" is a good way to describe
Impact, at least in terms of content: everything seems scaled back, from the movesets to the character creation tools to the gameplay types to weapons (chairs chairs everywhere!) and to the roster, where the fights against TNA stars like AJ Styles, Jeff Jarrett, The Motor City Machine Guns, Kurt Angle, and Samoa Joe are interspersed with match after match against random
jobbers you don't care about.
Impact doesn't even have an onscreen referee for you to beat up. The backbone of the game is actually solid, but the bones don't have enough meat on them. It seems like Midway spent a bunch of time creating the foundation and weren't left with enough time to add more content because the game had to ship.
And what content
is there needs to be unlocked before you can use it.
Despite the lack of stuff
Impact does manage to be fun at times, thanks to its accessibility; it's an easy game to get into if nothing else. But then you'll encounter the game's artificial intelligence, which will lead you to use swear words you never knew existed.
Impact uses a countering system, where if you press the right bumper at the correct time, you can reverse an opponent's attack and inflict some damage on him. It's a good system, but the computer can counter as well, and much more successfully than you can; for every move you manage to counter, the AI can reverse about five. This leads to match after match where you're totally dominating the opposition but because they counter so well, you'll lose because an enemy will reverse your attack and clobber you. To make matters worse, counters can be countered, which means you'll be on the receiving end of even more crushing blows. Late in the game enemies have big health bars and lots of damaging attacks to dish out; combine that with at least half your moves being reversed and you'll likely become so enraged you won't be able to finish the game because your controller will be laying in a smouldering heap on the floor.
So,
Impact features cheap AI when you're fighting against it, but things don't improve when that AI is fighting on your side: at one point the plot dictates that you do a bunch of tag-team matches with Eric Young as your partner. Young will often just stand there doing nothing while you're getting your ass handed to you mere inches away from him. There will be numerous times where Eric can save you from a pin by moving half a foot, but he won't bother.
If you want to play
TNA Impact, invite a friend or three over and have them join in. Your sanity will thank you.
Visually,
TNA Impact is fairly good: the wrestler models are very nicely done, and they're animated well. Most of the moves look good too;
Impact is much more fluid-looking than
Smackdown vs. Raw. In-engine cutscenes (the game uses
Unreal Engine 3) don't have the same level of sheen though; they look a bit crude when compared to the in-ring action. As an added bonus, the frame-rate is very good.
The sound in
Impact is decent: the combat noises are solid, and the voice-acting is alright, with TNA stars like Kevin Nash and Jeff Jarrett lending their voices and seemingly having a good time. The play-by-play commentary by TNA announcers Mike Tenay and Don West is very repetitive however, with the same few comments being heard over and over; it's not uncommon to hear the same phrase three or four times in a row. Music is sparing, limited mostly to a generic hard rock tune heard in the main menu.
For those who are into that sort of thing,
TNA Impact has multiplayer support for up to four people locally, and two players can go head-to-head over Xbox Live. Matches are easy to set up and look for online, but finding opponents is difficult.
Achievement seekers will find 34 achievements and 1000 GamerScore points to track down in
TNA Impact; finishing the game's story mode will probably net most people around 20 - 25 achievements. Others can be picked up by performing certain types of moves
X number of times or winning matches with particular characters. There are also a few multiplayer-only achievements.
Despite everything that's been written in this review,
TNA Impact isn't a bad game at all; it's just stripped down a bit too much, and it can be infuriating to play.
Smackdown vs. Raw is still king of the ring, but
Impact is worth a look if you can find it cheap and have a few spare controllers laying around.
3.0