I put many hours into this disk, because it's a solid, addictive wrestling game.
For wrestling game fans who may not be familiar with Day of Reckoning, it can be best described as a mixture of the AKI wrestling engine (which, on the N64, produced such classic wrestling games as WCW/NWO Revenge and WWF No Mercy), and the Smackdown: Here Comes the Pain engine.
The biggest influence on Day of Reckoning from the AKI engine is definitely the grappling system. A is your grapple button. Tapping it either by itself or while holding a direction gives you 5 different weak grapples. While holding down A, either by itself or with a direction, gives you 5 different strong grapples. This is quite similar to the AKI games and it works well. The same system is in place for all attacks.
The submission system and counter system are lifted directly from Smackdown: Here Comes the Pain. When you lock on a submission, a little meter pops up with a little ball that moves to the left or right. You have to tap A as fast as possible to either make the ball go all the way to the left (to make your opponent submit), or all the way to the right (when you're on the receiving end, to escape). Depending on how much damage is done to that specific body part, the meter starts either far to the right (when there's no damage so it's easy to escape), or far to the left (when there's a lot of damage, so it's easier to submit). It works fine.
The counter system is also very similar to Here Comes the Pain, with a few little changes that annoy me. Like Smackdown, you use the shoulder buttons for counters. But for some reason, the developers decided to switch the buttons. On Smackdown, L2 reverses strikes and R2 reverses grapples. In Day of Reckoning, the L trigger reverses grapples and the R trigger reverses strikes. Why they did this, I have no idea. Even after getting used to it, I still prefer the Smackdown setup. You can't change this in the options menu, which sucks.
Also, in Day of Reckoning, you can pull off counters from virtually any position, which can be both a good thing and a bad thing. In the Smackdown games, you can't counter when you're in certain vulnerable positions, like when you're taunting, or entering/exiting the ring. But in Day of Reckoning, you can counter in those positions. I'm not a big fan of that, especially when you're taunting. When wrestlers do taunts, they're showboting and thus they're not fully focused on their opponents, so it's a risky move to do. But in Day of Reckoning, the fact that you can counter while taunting negates all the risk. And since you can counter from any position, counters happen way too often in this game.
Milking this analogy of a mixture of the AKI and Smackdown engines further, is the finisher system. In the Smackdown games, every time you pull off a move it adds a little bit to your finisher meter. When it fills up, you get a stored finisher which you can use at any time. In the AKI games, when you built up enough momentum from pulling off moves, your character would go into a finisher pose and then would have a few seconds to pull off your finisher. If you did it quickly enough, you could even pull off your finisher twice in a row from one momentum meter. In Day of Reckoning, it blends both of these engines. Doing moves fills your meter, and once you fill it up, you get a stored finisher which you can use at any time. When you have a stored finisher, you press A and B at the same time to do your finisher pose, at which point you have about 15 seconds or so to pull off your finisher. It works pretty well.
But, I have my complaints with the finisher system. For one thing, finishers are far too strong in this game. Very early in the match, even with very little damage done to you, one finisher is enough to put an end to the match. Also, pulling off counters adds way too much to your meter. Depending on your Charisma stat, some wrestlers can completely fill their finisher meter by just pulling off one or two counters. Submissions also add way too much to your meter, as some wrestlers can fill up a finisher meter just with one submission hold. It's pretty cheap, and I'm not a big fan of that.
All in all, I'd say that Day of Reckoning plays more like the AKI games than the Smackdown games, but there's one exception that throws that theory out the window. That is, how short the matches are. As I mentioned before, one finisher early in the match is enough to beat you, but even without a finisher, most matches can end in only a few minutes, like the Smackdown games. While it works for the more arcade-style Smackdown games, I don't really like that here. Still, despite my complaints, Day of Reckoning plays very well. If you've ever wondered what it would be like if they mixed the AKI engine with the Smackdown engine, it works very nicely here.
The features in the game are good, but I have my complaints there as well. For one thing, the match selection. It's good for a first-in-a-series game, but it's nowhere near the level of Smackdown. Most of the match types are included, from the table match to the ladder match to the Hell in a Cell. But, my biggest problem is you're limited to only 4 wrestlers on the screen at once (compared to Smackdown where you can have up to 6 characters on the screen at once). This means that most of my favorite matches from Smackdown, such as the 6-man tag, the 2 vs. 2 vs. 2 ladder match, the 6-way battle royal, the Armageddon Hell in a Cell, and the Elimination Chamber won't be found in here, which is a huge blow. Also, the Royal Rumble isn't nearly as fun with only four characters at a time.
Even the match types that are here are hurt by many problems, making them a lot less fun than the Smackdown versions. The table and ladder matches are quite clunky compared to Smackdown, and the AI during these matches is horrendous. The Steel Cage and Hell in a Cell matches are hurt by the fact that there is very little interaction with the cages, making these matches kind of boring.
The season mode is pretty good, but not as good as the ones offered in Shut Your Mouth and Here Comes the Pain. Unlike those games, the season mode in Day of Reckoning is completely linear. There's no interaction outside of just playing out the predetermined story. Each match has objectives. Most of the time it's just to win, but sometimes you have to perform such tasks as hit two finishers, work the opponent's leg and get a submission, win without using a finisher, etc. Most of the time, if you lose your match or fail to meet your objective, you have to keep replaying the same match until you do so (although I believe you're allowed to lose some matches. And in one match, losing by DQ is actually required to move the story forward). I'm not a big fan of the linear nature of the story mode. It would be better if, like the later Smackdown vs. Raw games, the dialog was spoken, but in Day of Reckoning it's all text like the earlier Smackdown games.
Also, you can only play through season mode with created wrestlers. Luckily, the create-a-wrestler mode is very good in this game. It's about on par with the Smackdown games, although some options are missing. But this game also has one option that's not in the Smackdown games, and that is an excellent create-an-entrance mode. You can customize every aspect of your entrance, from the time you walk through the curtain to when you do a pose in the ring. You do this by picking from a number of pre-determined animations, but you can also change the lighting, camera angles and add a number of awesome pyrotechnics. The only downside to the create-an-entrance mode is that when you're playing through season mode, and you win a title, your wrestler loses his unique entrance and just does a generic walk to the ring. I guess the technology wouldn't allow them to keep the unique entrance with your wrestler holding a belt. It sucks, and it almost makes the create-an-entrance useless.
The graphics are fine for its time, but the sound is bad. The sound effects in the ring aren't realistic at all, there's no commentary, and all the licensed music in the game is identical to Smackdown vs. Raw. When I played Smackdown vs. Raw for the first time, I wasn't a big fan of these tracks. But hearing them again in Day of Reckoning, after hours of playing Smackdown vs. Raw, it's even worse. After hearing these songs so much, they become grating on your nerves. The same licensed tracks are also in Wrestlemania 21. So even though they produced three totally different games for the different consoles, they used the same licensed music on all of them, which sucks. When playing Day of Reckoning, I usually mute it and put on music or something instead.
So, in the end, Day of Reckoning is riddled with a lot of little flaws that ultimately prohibit it from matching the greatness of either of the games that inspired it. But that said, it's still a very fun, functional wrestling game with a decent variety of match types, decent season mode and good create-a-wrestler. Definitely a huge improvement over the previous Gamecube wrestling games. I put many hours into this disk, because it's a solid, addictive wrestling game. I think it's a victim of overhyping, but that's just because Gamecube owners were so excited to get a good wrestling game that they are kinda guilty of overrating it. But, that's getting away from my point. The point is that, Day of Reckoning is a good game.