Every decade or so, a new era dawns in the wrestling industry. From the Hulk Hogan-driven "Rock and Roll" era to the reign of Stone Cold Steve Austin, the business of fighting in a squared circle reinvents itself constantly. With WWE '12 THQ effectively hits the reset button on its core sports entertainment franchise, attempting to introduce a new era for the simulation series. These changes work. WWE '12 not only manages to still bottle the core essence and style of the wrestling industry, it does it in a way that doesn't sacrifice gameplay design and balance. If anything, the game's faults consist of attributes that ironically duplicate the WWE's own creative struggles.

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Previous wrestling games, much like their source material, seemed to focus on presentation and flash rather than substance. The Smackdown vs. Raw series never sat well with me from a mechanical perspective. While all the moves, entrances and wrestlers were technically there, playing through matches was a chore compared to the pacing and addictive gameplay offered bya decade ago. There was no tension, there was no drama and ultimately, there was no fun. The experience was more like batting around action figures than recreating something that felt like the captivating product that has repeatedly hooked me for over a decade. Wrestling isn't about any one move or moment in time. It's about a story, one that is woven in a ring over 20 minutes, escalating in intensity until a victor is revealed. If a game can't find a way to bring that theatricality to players, it might as well not be made.WWE '12 finds that pacing. The changes start with the controls, allowing players to grapple and chain into light moves and execute more powerful attacks as opponents get weaker. More dynamic systems for submissions and pins escalate in tension, creating narrow windows of opportunity to escape while visually highlighting that struggle on the screen. The animated transitions between offense and defense are more fluid, eliminating many of the jarring, awkward moments that previous games so repeatedly featured. Occasionally wrestlers revert to a stunned state a bit too easily, and the animation and hit detection for objects like ladders and chairs feels a little off, but the impact of these inconsistencies is minimal.The game's designers have clearly spent a lot of time making sure matches have a natural progression, one that subtly incorporates all of the above ideas into something that simply feels right. It tells the story of wrestling in a brilliant way while never losing itself in the process. Remarkably, the developers WWE '12 seem to understand wrestling better than the writers creating the television product do. As revered as WWE No Mercy is, that game never managed to naturally tell an in-ring story like this game can.A wrestling story is only as good as the wrestlers involved, and WWE '12 offers a spectacular roster. The game contains well over 60 superstars, featuring a healthy mix of icons past and present. From The Rock to the Undertaker to Bryan Danielson, the range of talent is impressive, and that's to say nothing of the DLC, which will eventually add legends like Mick Foley.How these wrestlers operate within the ring is also of great importance. The game's AI ranges from borderline incompetent to extremely dangerous. On easier levels, your opponents might grab you and not execute a move for several seconds. Ratchet that difficulty up several notches and you'll have a challenge on your hands. The AI does have a tendency to rely heavily on cheap reversals to boost its potency. If you find that as annoying and unfair as I do, you can easily turn that frequency down in the options menu, forcing your digital opponent to play fair.Avoiding matches against the computer will still result in the best experience with WWE '12. Though the AI works reasonably well, the unpredictability and natural competitive environment that emerges against other human players is far superior. The user interface of the online menus isn't as streamlined or intuitive as the rest of the game, and an odd post-match design choice to kick me back to a lobby and not follow my opponent into a new round seems a bit ridiculous. Some of my earliest attempts to play online occasionally featured enough latency issues to make time-based actions like kicking out of a pin virtually impossible. However, more recent sessions were absolutely lag-free, which bodes well for launch.