The game’s woes extend to the wrestler AI as well. Your opponents aren’t the brightest of adversaries, and do a very poor job of adjusting to your play. This means that you can often find something that works reasonably well and just keep going back to it again and again. Your opponent can occasionally put the hurt on you, but he never seems able to seize the advantage to put you away or to surprise you and catch you off guard. In the special matches the AI doesn’t even seem to be all that aware of his surroundings – for example, my opponent never showed much interest in trying to get out of the cage in the cage matches.

All of these issues make for some odd and frustrating gameplay. Sometimes you can actually pull off the move that you wanted to, at others you’ll be mashing at the buttons trying to get something, anything, to happen. It’s almost surreal to watch the wrestlers sluggishly move around the ring, grasping at air, timing their moves with the reflexes of a drunken college student on a Friday night, and sometimes even inexplicably flopping or getting up when they shouldn’t be. Luckily the game is so easy that even with these handicaps you’ll rarely lose a match.

In addition to the standard quick and match play modes, the game includes story and classic match modes. The story mode is not much more than a string of matches played with a single wrestler. There’s a minimum of text between the matches that is supposed to serve as the story, but it’s almost a joke. It’s as if the writers were told to establish the player’s motivation for the next match in 150 words or less. The classic match mode is more interesting. It allows you to recreate 15 classic match-ups from the past such as Hulk Hogan’s duel with Andre the Giant. Unfortunately you don’t get to play through the whole match; you begin at a historic moment in the match and take control from there. This severely hampers the replay value of these matches and you’ll more than likely play through them once or twice and then be done with this mode.

Showdown includes a lot of the hype that goes along with wrestling matches like the wrestlers’ theme music accompanied grand entrances, the overly enthusiastic introductions, and in match commentary from Bobby Heenan, Tony Schiovane, and Larry Zbysko. All of these touches are implemented adequately enough, but they just can’t make up for the broken gameplay. The game is just not very much fun to play and is hard to recommend to just about anyone.

In The End, This Game Hath Been Rated: 52%.  If you’re in the small segment of the population that is a diehard wrestling fan with a lot of patience and a very forgiving nature then Showdown will be a labor of love for you. All others should leave it on the mat.

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