If it’s Wrestlemania season, that means it’s time for a new WWE 2K game. 2K26 came in hot, a little too hot to get a comprehensive look at the entire thing before the “pay more to play early” period opened up today. But I’ve spent a good chunk of time running the ropes in this year’s ring, and so far it’s been a solid next chapter in what has been this series’ most impressive run to date. That said, with another milquetoast showcase mode and the growing presence of monetization wrapping itself around the experience like an anaconda vise, it’s starting to feel like the golden age for 2K wrestling games might be coming to an end.
2K26 hasn’t learned many new moves since last year, mostly just tweaking existing base mechanics. The biggest slam to the system is an adjustment to stamina, adding a condition called “winded” to superstars who run out. While winded, your stamina wheel turns from yellow to purple, and you can no longer run or use reversals until it empties and goes back to normal. This adds more risk-reward to all of the offensive and defensive actions you do in the ring that cost stamina.
It also creates a solution to the 2K series issue of how powerful the reversal system is (you are basically unstoppable if you’ve become the Tribal Chief of pressing one button on time, every time) by making it cost stamina to do and penalizing you for running your stamina into the red. However, it doesn’t address the problem of how the reversal prompts are unintuitive and sometimes at unpredictable points during a move’s animation, making picking the system up feel impossible without hours of ring time and muscle memory development. You win some, you lose some.
Other adjustments are nice to have but don’t change the flow or feel of matches significantly. Harkening back to the series’ pre-Visual Concepts days, collision physics have been changed slightly, so throws and bumps are less trapped in canned animation sequences and interact with objects around them. A body suplexed into the ropes will actually bounce off them in a more appropriately reactive way instead of attempting to clip through them. Throw an opponent onto the ring stairs, and they’ll properly crunch around their hulking metal block. Does this allow objects laying on the ground to do a significant amount more damage if you drop someone on them, an ever-present trope of professional wrestling of all forms? More testing is necessary, but it’s unclear right now.
Another blast from the past are the additional match types added in 2K26: I Quit, Dumpster, Inferno, and Three Stages of Hell. That last one is essentially a gauntlet match where you choose three different match stipulations and you wrestle through them, two-out-of-three falls style. The Dumpster match is functionally no different than the Casket or Ambulance matches, where you have to weaken opponents enough to shove them in a box they don’t want to be in. The Inferno match returns from the Smackdown vs Raw series with a more straight forward play path: Doing moves increases the temperature gauge, and once it’s at max, you must expose the enemy to the flames to win. This was cool, but also isn’t that special once the new car smell has burned away.
I Quit is arguably the best of these new options, basically elaborating on the submission match, but instead of the normal mashing minigame, players that are being forced to say I Quit must pass a series of checks hitting the right spots on a gauge enough times to continue on. These spots get smaller as you take more damage, and opponents can add blockers to make the task that much harder, which they can earn the same way they earn finishers. This is a really clever idea, just complex enough to be engaging and tactical without being too much to deal with.
I dabbled in The Island, the weird, Street Fighter World Tour-esque multiplayer hub world that lets players create their own wrestlers, participate in open world RPG-style quests while also competing with each other on leaderboards, and it’s at least a more coherent game mode out of the gate this time. It embraces the fantastical nature of last year’s version, leaning into mysterious powers of The Island of Relevancy, now being divided up by three different factions all fighting to gain its magical powers. This sort of pro wrestling RPG nonsense is something that I would be all over on paper, but the original Island’s poor writing and janky pacing put me off. This year at least seems to be attempting to address that. I’m not sure it’s a better written project yet, but it’s at least fully voiced and easy to navigate. I haven’t gotten deep enough to see just when the cold grip of monetization starts to strangle this mode into submission, but if it’s anything like last year’s, it will be early and often.
Battle Passes make their debut in 2K26, and they leave a lot to be desired. There is a lot to earn split between free and premium pass tracks. Many of the free rewards are arenas, superstars, championships, and cosmetics you would have otherwise earned a free currency to buy from an in-game store in previous games, while the premium track features a lot of MyFaction related goodies and a handful of extra wrestlers, with this first season themed around the stars of AAA. These replace the wrestler DLC drops of old, and I can see them being a frustrating replacement – not simply because it means you’ll need to grind matches in order to unlock things you’d just buy previously, but also because unlocking new tiers seems to take a lot of work. I spent around five hours between random exhibition matches, showcase mode, and The Island, and have only made it to tier four of 40. At the end of the track are unlockables, like what would have been the late Bray Wyatt’s last costume and a really cool move that I would have loved to give to a custom wrestler, but I fear I simply don’t have the endurance for that grind, or the patience to accept that I even have to.
I’ve spent most of my time so far with this year’s Showcase, themed around the highlights and lowlights of CM Punk’s two-pronged WWE career. It suffers from most of the same problems that these modes always have, like its gaping holes in history that it has to ignore for corporate reasons, or the awkward ways it tries and fails to recreate major moments in real matches as gameplay moments. I’m a little bit more than halfway through it, so I won’t comment specifically on what’s absent or not until I see it all, though I can be confidently disappointed that his matches with Bryan Danielson won’t be among the playlist since he’s with a rival company these days.
The 10+ year gap he’s had in his career is already a spectre that really haunts this mode, as it makes the pickings for memorable moments to relive slim. They try to address this with a little kayfabe, Punk engaging in a little metanarrative between matches to use the “Slingshot Technology” that Showcase employs to meld matches and real footage as a sort of time machine. That allows him to both undo some losses in his own career, embody Bret Hart to prevent the Montreal Screwjob, and indulge himself in a bunch of “what if” dream matches. These definitely feel more like busy work than cool experiences, even though they are right in line with the toybox nature of wrestling games to begin with.
So far, WWE 2K26 is proving that this solid five-year run the series has been on was built on a great foundation. One that has barely had to change, but continues to in ways that are starting to hurt more than help. The smaller gameplay tweaks and match types are at best great and at worst irrelevant, and there are still large bugaboos that show no real sign of improvement, like the centerpiece Showcase mode. And some changes, like the addition of the battle pass, make growing your collection of cosmetics, moves, and wrestlers worse and more expensive. This isn’t a knockout blow for the series, but its certainly a threat to the champion. Hopefully, when I sink more time into other modes like MyRise and MyGM, they’re good enough to help rally this heavyweight to a win.
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