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Xbox | Fighting | Backyard Wrestling 2: There Goes the Neighborhood

Boxart for Backyard Wrestling 2: There Goes the Neighborhood
Backyard Wrestling 2: There Goes the Neighborhood 30 screen shots
  • GRAPHICS: 2.5
  • SOUND: 1.0
  • CONTROL: 2.0
  • FUN FACTOR 1.5
  • AVG USER SCORE 2.3
  • AVG CRITIC SCORE 1.8

Review: Backyard Wrestling 2: There Goes the Neighborhood

Review by Rice Burner | 12/22/2004 | 15:17:59 PM PST

Smells like something your dog buried in the backyard.

With cobbling unorthodox wrestling stunts, over 20 licensed wrestler personalitiesincluding a few female porn starsand a vast array of options in the create-a-wrestler mode, Backyard Wrestling 2: There Goes The Neighborhood endeavors to give the fighting genre a taste of hardcore wrestling.

Mmmm&Tera Patrick

Backyard Wrestling 2 improves on its predecessor by instituting a number of additional abilities and amping up the testosterone level a few notches. The gameplay now includes the abilities to block, guard-break, pin, and enact submission moves. Also, new to the Backyard Wrestling franchise is the Enviro-Mental throws. Every stage has a few of these throws, which can be activated by grabbing your opponent in a front grapple when you are near a certain location (an icon will appear letting you know where to do them). These range from slamming an opponents head repeatedly in a car trunk to dunking your victims head in a deep fryer.

While the newest improvements are cool, Backyard Wrestling 2 is a fundamentally flawed game. The gameplay is wrought with glitchessaying its a chore to play is an understatement. You can expect bad collision, horrible hit detection, and a list of clipping issues longer than its worth describing.

Whos Neighborhood Are We In Again?

Whats even worse is that Backyard Wrestling 2 actually expects you to go through several hours of challenge and mission matches before you can even play Career Mode. These prerequisite matches consist of enacting a specific type of move repeatedly or facing lower tiered licensed wrestlers. While its nice to have a tutorial about the game engine, this system is counter intuitive and saps all the fun out of the gameonce youre actually allowed to enter a tournament, you wont care anymore.

With sloppy production values, insane load times, sub-par graphics and sound, and gameplay that irrevocably evolves into: grapple, counter, super, grapple, counter, super, this game isnt even worth the rental fee.