The world of professional wrestling is a lively tapestry woven from diverse in-ring approaches, like the technician, high-flyer, powerhouse, and the brawler. When WWE 2K attempts to replicate this ecosystem in interactive gameplay, the results are surprisingly good at first glance. Playing as Brock Lesnar is always fun for me, but there’s no denying that there is a bit of a lack of diversity.
The developers utilize a class-based system, assigning attributes and distinct gameplay bonuses to various wrestling styles. This helps in making matches between wrestlers feel fundamentally different. For example, a match between Roman Reigns and Rey Mysterio will feel different from a match between Randy Orton and AJ Styles.
While the 2K engine easily carves out unique advantages for specific archetypes, a closer look unveils some issues. Beneath the layer of specialized movesets, the rhythm of strikes, reversals, and grapples remains universal. That’s not necessarily a problem, but it does limit the overall freedom you expect from certain wrestling styles.
Strikers And Powerhouses
The Powerhouse and Striker are undeniably the best-represented styles in the WWE 2K series, due to their strengths aligning with the game’s high-impact offense and defense gameplay.
Powerhouses, embodied by superstars like Roman Reigns, are defined by extreme strength, especially from grapples and signature moves. They are players made to inflict a large amount of damage instantly, being supported by high stats like strength and stamina. This allows them to completely overpower smaller wrestlers and recover quickly from minor damage.
The animations, although repetitive, emphasize heavy slams, explosive suplexes, and movesets conveying a crushing weight. These animations are often met with criticism that a light heavyweight and a super heavyweight use the same moves with ease, which does ruin immersion a bit.
Strikers, like Shinsuke Nakamura, focus more on rapid-fire combos and strikes. They have the upper hand in terms of the speed with which their strikes fill out the enemy’s stun meter, perfect for a “rush-down” archetype. Even the AI for these characters is more aggressive, favoring quick strikes over grapples.
This rapid playstyle is unique from the slower powerhouse, but the line often blurs, as the move creation suite lets any playstyle adopt any move. It is not rare to see a ‘Powerhouse’ carrying out a rapid fire combo, specifically in the hands of players who prioritize high-rated moves over authenticity.
High-Flyers
A style that is arguably the most visually appealing, but unfortunately, is always badly represented in WWE 2K, is the High-Flyer style. This style involves a high-risk, high-reward approach relying on speed and agility to overwhelm larger opponents by performing flashy tricks. Think of legendary wrestlers like Rey Mysterio, Ricochet, or Iyo Sky, who carried out aerial tricks to defeat their opponents.
Unfortunately, they’re also glass cannons. They deal great offense, but are fragile like glass due to low defensive stats. The deep-rooted problem lies in the core gameplay mechanics and the poor representation of Lucha Libre elements. High-flyers often feel clunky and restricted because of the game’s stiff pacing; the game’s reversal window system reduces the timing window to the same as for a slow giant.
While the inclusion of unique High-Flyer dives and distinct dodge mechanics tries to add a twist, the sheer amount of buttons needed to perform these tricks often makes them impractical. This leads players to use the High-Flyer’s fast speed to run away and milk the corner-rope attacks instead of building fluid attacks inspired by the Lucha Libre style.
Technicians
Known as the “ring-general,” the Technician archetype is best represented by legends like Bret Hart and Kurt Angle. It is labeled as the most balanced class, skilled in grappling, submission, and counters. In the WWE 2K series, Technicians are masters of the counter-game, swiftly building their momentum and stun meter through successful reversals.
The game reintroduced Chain Wrestling in recent releases in an attempt to differentiate the Technician from others. This mini-game is a test of quick decision-making and grappling skills, suitable only for Technicians who dominate this type of play.
However, this “balanced” playstyle acts as a double-edged sword, often translating to a bland experience. Though they do excel at submission and grappling, the submission mini-game can be easily dominated by a player of any class if they simply have high submission attributes.
In addition to this, as the offense and defense of a Technician are just average, players are forced to yet again exploit a certain playstyle: a metagame of strike-spam and reversal-fishing. Once the Chain Wrestling phase is finished, their unique identity fades away, giving the feeling that all wrestlers play the same once the match reaches its mid-game stride.
The Takeaway
For the most part, WWE 2K games do a “good enough” job of representing various wrestling styles. I didn’t talk much about the Giant characters here much, as they’re the worst in my opinion. They have immense strength and often can’t be grappled as easily, but that’s about it. They’re slow, boring, don’t have much stamina, and are easily countered by many normal-sized wrestlers. Strikers and powerhouses are the best represented and are the most fun characters to use. As much as I enjoy using high-flyers, it often feels like that “fluidity” is missing. Finally, technical wrestlers are a bit boring. Sure, they’re good at countering and submissions, but they often just play like generic wrestlers. Hopefully, with rumors of AAA wrestlers in WWE 2K26, we get to see some better wrestling fundamentals.
