Professional wrestling, in terms of the physical performances required, is a pretty complex thing to emulate compared to something like, say, baseball, or tennis. In order to make a wrestling game that all the millions (and millions) of wrestling fans can play, a lot of that has been traditionally been streamlined or abstracted, but WWE 2K16

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The biggest expression of this is how the reversal system has been fleshed out. Fans get nervous whenever reversals are brought up, because how they’re handled can have a massive effect on match flow, to the point of ruin in some cases. But so far, the changes and additions that Yukes and Visual Concepts have made are helping immensely.For starters, reversals are now an actual resource you need to manage. More technically sound wrestlers might have a stock of five, while others might have four or three. Every time you successfully reverse a move, you lose one stock, which will begin to regenerate very slowly over time. The result is that matches between two good players won’t turn into an endless chain of reversals, occasionally highlighted by a successful move when someone makes a mistake. It keeps the pace of the match moving a lot more like what you see in an actual match.The next layer is the addition of “major” reversals. Not every move can be reversed in this way, but the ones that can be have unique reversal indicators. The first will show up during the normal reversal window at the start of a move, but if you wait, there will be a second, smaller window somewhere in the middle. It’s much tougher to hit, and costs two reversal stocks, but the effort is worth it, giving you a momentum boost that can swing the direction of the match.This played a big role in how I approached the matches I played. Since I wanted to keep two reversals stocked at all times in case a major reversal opportunity popped up, I’d let smaller moves hit me unless I was really taking a beating. Likewise, I found myself holding off on big moves I knew could be major reversed until my opponent only had a single stock left to prevent them from hitting one. Don’t want your finisher reversed? Save it for when your opponent is out of reversals to guarantee that you’ll hit with it. No previous entry in the series has made me think this way.Just like last year, stamina is also a resource you have to manage, and Working Holds are a great tool for doing so. Wrestling smarks know what these are about, it’s a prolonged hold that gives both performers a chance to catch their breath for the latter part of the match. In WWE 2K16, the principle is similar, you can slap on a Working Hold to give yourself time to regain stamina while draining your opponent’s. Not only is this a great tactic to employ if you find yourself falling behind an opponent with better conditioning, but again, it adds another element of the pacing and storytelling that goes on in an actual match.Submissions are the final piece of the puzzle that’s really come along. Though last year, the submissions system was “all-new” in theory, in practice it was just more button mashing. This year, it’s completely new and totally skill based. It’s hard to describe, but imagine a circular icon shows up and you and your opponent each control a rotatable wedge of it. In order to submit your opponent you have to keep their section covered with yours, so you’ll be jockeying back and forth with the analog stick in a sort of cat-and-mouse fashion.Practically speaking, this means a few things. For one, the mashing is finally over, and submitting someone is now about working a part of their body, and having the dexterity to outmaneuver them in the mini-game, which is a lot more like how submission holds actually work. More exciting is the fact that you can theoretically submit someone early in a match if you outplay them if you get good at that mini-game. Not only is that potentially exciting, but it also helps characters with submission finishers, who almost never got the win off their first finisher due to the nature of the old system.The combined effect of all this from the handful of matches I played is that WWE 2K16 plays more like an actual wrestling match looks, and that it engages me in ways wrestling games typically haven’t.

Vincent Ingenito is IGN's foremost fighting game nerd. F ollow him on Twitter and tell him what you want him to test out next time he plays Street Fighter 5.