Backyard Wrestling: Don't Try This At HomeIs the title of this game nothing more than a moniker or perhaps a prophetic warning?

We have the details inside.As the popularity and size of Vince McMahon's World Wrestling Entertainment promotion has increased over the years so too has the number of independent wrestling organizations. Though WCW and ECW have gone the way of the dinosaur, a number of smaller regional federations have been popping up all over North America. Reminiscent of the old days before the WWF, NWA, and AWA had begun their "Big Three" push of the 1980s; this latest rebirth of sports entertainment has provided plenty of options for disenchanted fans on the lookout for something new.

One such substitute is the increasingly popular phenomenon of Backyard Wrestling: which is generally considered to be a brutal underground exhibition of violent hardcore antics. Featured on several news magazines and prime time broadcasts as the scourge of Middle-American teenagers, Backyard Wrestling continues to rise in popularity with every passing month. Inspiring the formation of countywide associations, amateur home videos, and weekly events that bring in almost as many people as High School wresting matches, this new favorite of alternative culture appears to have a long future ahead of it -- and U.K. publisher Eidos seems to know it.

Collaborating with the X-Men: Next Dimension and Thrill Kill contractors Paradox Development, Eidos has managed to nab the official Backyard Wrestling license in conjunction with the Insane Clown Posse's own promotion JCW. Boasting over 20 different grapplers from both organizations, a truckload of different weapons, and a couple of interesting gameplay mechanics, BYW appears on the surface to give THQ and EA a run for their wrestling dollar. Dig a little deeper, however, and the truth becomes more readily apparent: Backyard Wrestling still has a ways to go.Gameplay
From the outset, it's obvious that the team at Paradox has taken a much different approach towards wrestling than the current genre champs Aki and Yukes. Opening up the field of play quite a bit, Backyard Wrestling provides seven reasonably large free-roaming environments and a multi-tiered height system that allows players to climb on top of different structures for varying damage. Given the "wrestle anywhere" mentality of BYW, this concept is a good one and takes some getting used to for fans of more grounded titles like RAW or Smackdown.

BYW's locales are pretty bizarre though: with a messy backyard, filthy truck stop, and bloody slaughterhouse serving as the game's first three stages. From there it gets even more peculiar as your character moves into the confines of a gentleman's club complete with pole-dancing strippers preceding the parking lot of a suburban mall. Afterwards you're headed off to a rich doctor's mansion before ending your journey on the set of a sleazy afternoon talk show that also happens to double as the plot device between stages.

The arenas are fully interactive and entirely destructible too, standing out as the game's most compelling and entertaining component. Trucks, gasoline pumps, windows, doors, sofas, and a score of other obstacles can be shattered, broken, or abused in a myriad of different ways and some of the remains can even be picked up and used as weapons. More conventional armaments such as barbed wire baseball bats, Tiki torches, and television sets are scattered throughout every stage as well and play an important role in the wearing down of your opponent -- as they can do twice the damage of regular strikes and can move an opponent's dizzy meter in the upwards direction rather quickly.

Speaking of dizzy meters Backyard Wrestling provides not one, not two, but three different gauges used to confuse your opponent. Given one bar each for strikes, slams, and jump damage, the meters rise depending on what kind of maneuver is performed and can even be chained together for prolonged dizziness. These three measurements work entirely independent of each other and are separated from the fourth and final character display: the standard health gauge. This system on the whole works pretty effectively and provides a rather complex recipe for tracking a wrestler's well being without becoming overly systematic.Unfortunately the area of expertise that the Backyard Wrestling team should view as the game's most important aspect of success is actually where it begins to falter; namely in terms of the combat mechanics. Hindered by the fact that your characters are constantly running around from place to place in search of weapons or obstacles to use against each other, an emblematic bout consists of a series of short-distance sprints and item retrievals. The reason it works this way is because the flow of the action is heavily dependant on an opponent's momentum -- with the last person to attack gaining split-second advantages over his victim. When playing against the more difficult A.I. opponents especially, gamers will need to keep their distance as long as possible in order to fight off an inevitable computer shellacking. But where's the fun in constant escape if you're playing an offensive wrestling game?

To their credit, the designers have attempted to fix this shortcoming by including the ability to counter any single maneuver. Irish whips, slams, or throws can be reversed simply by hitting the directional pad and proper button the moment your wrestler flashes white. With the ability to counter or reverse any type of offensive attack, players should be less likely to jog around the environments or get caught in long strings of A.I.-initiated ass-whippings -- or at least, in theory they should. The problem is that your opponents will chain punches and kicks together more often than any other type of attack; but unlike throws or grapples, your character doesn't give any type of signal to let you know when you can reverse the chain (and most times you can't interrupt the sequence anyway). This tactic works for human opponents too, making the need for slams and holds almost useless until someone is dizzy. All you'll have to do is keep punching or kicking someone until they're punch drunk, perform one of your slams, and repeat. Boom! It's an instant knockout and you don't even have to worry about pinning.With this type of system it appears that Backyard Wrestling is setup more like a fighting game rather than a wrestler -- and the move list obviously reflects that: as each of the 20-plus characters has only eight grapples apiece as well as a single finisher. Strangely Paradox and Eidos have additionally chosen to exclude any type of block or defensive button as well, and with an emphasis on strikes and only eight moves to counter or reverse against, its depth in any genre remains somewhat limited. But at least the team has seen fit to include a couple of extra modes besides the main Talk Show quest, including the survival and king of the hill modes. There's a create-a-wrestler feature too, but it's so basic and restricted in comparison to every other wrestling game out there that it'll probably be disappointing for spoiled wrestling fans.

Graphics
If there's one thing that Backyard Wrestling does well, it's render blood. A virtual geyser of crimson hemoglobin, BYW's level of gore is up there with other classic bleeders such as Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance and Tenchu: Wrath of Heaven. Just about every attack you perform creates some kind of violent reaction to your opponent's person and before all is said and done the visuals can get pretty brutal. Also worth mentioning is the excellent camera -- it manages to stay with your wrestler no matter where he may be; panning out when necessary and keeping you abreast of the action.

Unfortunately the slowdown in some of the more convoluted areas of a stage can get pretty bad at times. With extremely noticeable stutter when one of your combatants is surrounded by obstacles. The level of detail on the character models aren't exactly cutting edge either, and the poor collision detection will see your grapplers clipping through objects more often than not. Animations, on the other hand, are quite nice.Sound
Backyard Wrestling's soundtrack is very solid. It boasts an unbelievable amount of hard rock from the last 15 or years or so and contains artists such as The Insane Clown Posse, Machine Head, Sepultura, Anthrax, and American Hi-Hi. Of particular note is Biohazard's "Punishment" (which is one of the best ass-kicking songs of all time) and Dropkick Murphy's "This is Your Life". Of course, this sort of music won't necessarily appeal to everyone but for the target audience that Eidos is shooting for, it's the perfect backdrop.

In terms of sound effects and vocals, Backyard has done a good job of capturing the Foley that it needs to. Grunts, groans, and other such noises make their appearance in all the right places and the humorous voice acting during cut scenes provides a couple of legitimate laughs. As an added bonus, wrestlers whose likenesses are used have provided their voices for taunts and intros as well, so their fans should be happy to know that they're well-represented.

Closing Comments
Because it's aimed at a very particular audience and is so vastly different than any other wrestler out there, Don't Try This At Home is a difficult game to judge. On the plus side, it offers plenty of cool weaponry and environments to toy around with, a violently satisfying theme, and an easy pick up and play control scheme. The fans of the Backyard Wrestling line of DVDs, Insane Clown Posse junkies, and blood fiends should probably go nuts over it.

When evaluated on some of its more technical merits, though, there are still plenty of issues that hold it back from reaching the same success as THQ's bigger line of grapplers. Overly shallow in the mechanical department and not quite sure if it wants to be a fighting game or a wrestler, Don't Try This At Home isn't as fulfilling as it should be. If given the proper amount of refinement in the gameplay department, however, and if expanded upon in the create-a-wrestler and the story modes, then this new approach to a dominated genre could definitely have potential. But as it stands now, we can't see ourselves recommending this beyond a rental.