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WWE 2K23 Review: Freshly raking the sands of the island of relevancy

It lives up to its slogan.

The marketing slogan of this year’s WWE 2K title is “Even Stronger”, and it may be the most accurate and apt one-liner for a video game so far in this generation.

WWE 2K23 is utterly and entirely WWE 2K22 but even stronger.

A little history: midway through the production of WWE 2K20, development duties for the series switched from Yukes in Japan over to Visual Concepts in California. That game launched in a such an utterly broken and unfinished state that the decision was made to cancel the un-announced but inevitable 2K21 to allow the new studio time to give the series a sorely needed overhaul for the following year. The gambit well and truly paid off, with WWE 2K22 being received as the best entry in the series yet.

We’re now back to the series being on its traditional yearly cycle, and so unsurprisingly WWE 2K23 is not the quantum leap in quality over its predecessor that 2K22 was. It’s absolutely an “even stronger” version of that game though, which is really about as good as can be expected and hoped for from any annual sports title.

Animations are smoother and more fluid, hit detection is better and impacts feel more weighty, character models are on the whole a notch above, and for once there’s really no talent whose digital avatar stands out as being outright bad. Hair still tends to look weirdly like flattened straw, but even it is definitely better than we saw in previous years.

Even the commentary feels slightly more natural than it did; it’s still repetitive and sometimes outright grating, but it feels like they may have at least gotten Michael Cole, Corey Graves, and Byron Saxton in the studio to record some of their lines together. There are occasions where their back and forth flows quite naturally, which is something I can’t say that I ever felt in previous titles. Every facet of the overall presentation has been lifted in some way or another. None of these improvements are particularly significant in their own right, but cumulatively they make 2K23 feel like the slickest and most polished entry in the series yet.

As a treat for fans of WWE’s video game YouTube network UpUpDownDown, the tutorials, tooltips and introductions to the various game modes are hosted this year by WWE Superstar Xavier Woods in his closer-to-real-life gaming presenter persona of Austin Creed. The returning and slightly revamped MyGM mode also features his UUDD co-presenter ‘Prince Pretty’ Tyler Breeze, both in its intro video and as a playable general manager, allowing fans to roleplay the duo’s immensely popular ongoing “Battle of the Brands” series.

Adrenaline in my (con)sole

In a move sure to delight NXT fans, the iconic WarGames match type finally makes its game debut, and it’s every bit the chaotic blast that you’d hope. Playing as Dominik Mysterio and dropping Cody Rhodes through a flaming table inside the caged twin-rings had me genuinely hooting in my seat, and I know it’s going to be the match type I revisit most by far.

The superstar career retrospective 2K Showcase mode stars John Cena this year, and in a fun twist actually has you play as his opponents instead of as the Dr. of Thuganomics himself. It’s a minor change, but one that makes the mode remarkably more entertaining and engaging as each chapter grants the player a different wrestler with a different feel and moveset, instead of just making them play as the same guy for over a dozen straight matches. The narrative sees John reflecting on his mistakes as much as his triumphs, which feels appropriate for a guy who seems to have become a lot more humble and introspective in the twilight years of his in-ring career.

With the tone of the mode being as largely downbeat as it is though, it’s disappointing that the Firefly Funhouse ‘cinematic’ match between Cena and Bray Wyatt from WrestleMania 36 isn’t featured, as that whole thing was a wildly inventive journey into Cena’s prior sins and failings and would’ve been a perfect fit for the tale Showcase is telling. At a recent press event I actually asked some of the developers if the match was ever on the cards for the game and was told that they couldn’t include it as Wyatt wasn’t signed to WWE during the planning phase of the games development. Oh well. Fortunately Wyatt is coming to the game as DLC down the road at least.

MyRise, where players take their custom superstar through a structured story all the way to WrestleMania, has seen significant improvements in narrative pacing and variation of gameplay this year too. Both male and female stories, each of which are fully distinct from one another, still have the same overall design as before, but they’re both much less of a slog to push through than in previous incarnations.

You get thrown into matches where you have to follow the script that the game’s story demands just like you do in Showcase mode more often now, and I appreciate how this helps temper the grind of having to just straight up win match after match to push the adventure forward. Branching choices throughout aren’t clearly signposted as being specifically villainous heel or heroic face, though context tends to make this pretty clear anyway.

The lauded Creation Suite has a bunch of additions in all areas, with significantly improved face texture scans being among the more notable and noticeable. Custom arenas can now be played in online matches which is neat, and entrances can be tailor-made to a deeper degree than in recent years.

The virtual playing card collecting MyFaction is just as much the microtransaction pit it was last year but now has online multiplayer as a feature, and Universe continues to be the entirely-not-for-me long-term booking mode it always has been. Apparently it features a reworked story system this year, so that’s cool I suppose.

The aforementioned MyGM mode that debuted last year has been expanded upon with a greater number of bookable match types as well as more general manager personas and brand/show options to choose from at the outset. The inability to import custom arenas or shows is a bummer, but I can absolutely see how opening the floodgates for the community to build a full-blown All Elite Wrestling/Impact/Ring of Honor etc. booking simulator inside of their WWE game was probably something Visual Concepts consciously wanted to avoid.  The entire mode still is not nearly as deep or complex as fans have wished it to be, but the additions are a welcome, if small, step up from what the mode offered in 2K22.

The Judgement Day

My prevailing feeling on WWE 2K23 on the whole is that it’s a welcome, if small, step up. Nobody who is coming over from WWE 2K22 will really be wowed by anything here, but the cumulative minor updates, iterations, additions and improvements are all very good and very welcome. Your mileage will vary depending on how worthwhile an overall modest update to last years title is to you, but for my money the few dozen hours of excellent sports entertainment that the pair of new MyRise stories and the Cena Showcase provide are worth the price of admission on their own, and WarGames is the juiciest possible cherry on top.

Tragically however, while the game once again does feature multiple versions of the Undertaker, not one of them features his Rollin’ entrance, and I continue to be both mad and sad about it. Maybe next year.

WWE 2K23 releases widely on 17 March on Windows PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series S, Xbox Series X, PS4 and PS5.

7.5 out of 10

WWE 2K23 was reviewed using a promotional code on PS5, as provided by the publisher. Click here to learn more about Stevivor’s scoring scale.


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About the author

Jam Walker

Jam Walker is a freelance games and entertainment critic from Melbourne, Australia. They hold a bachelor's degree in game design from RMIT but probably should have gotten a journalism one instead. They/Them. Send for the Man.