It breaks my heart to give this a thumbs down.

I am an independent professional wrestler, so the subject matter of this game is extremely interesting to me. I love the idea of playing a game as a struggling Indy wrestler trying to make it in a cutthroat and difficult business. Indy wrestling is driving 250 miles to get paid $20 to wrestle some has been who thinks he's too good for you and intentionally makes you look bad. Its about passion and love for the carefully constructed performance art that is professional wrestling.

This however offers nothing to simulate that experience. Instead, you have a completely luck based system that in my few hours of play seems heavily and consistently biased toward the CPU (the last match I played I did five strikes early in the match, calculation gave each around an 80% chance to hit, four missed). You face no name indy wrestlers that inexplicably have unbeleivable statistics and are seemingly impossible to beat because of the luck based gameplay determined by the statistics. There is no incorporation of match psyychology, or anything to make this a pro wrestling simulator in the least bit.

Worst of all, the performance art aspect of pro wrestling is completely lost in this game. Your success is measured exclusively by your win/loss record. Putting on a great match is absolutely meaningless unless you win, and the matches are simulated completely as competition rather than performance art.

I don't understand how GreyDog can simulate pro-wrestling so well in TEW and so poorly in this game. If you are looking for a great pro wrestling simulator go for TEW 2013. And if you want to experience the life of an aspiring wrestler, either play WWE 2K16 or train to wrestle yourself. It will be easier and less frustrating than this game.

DO NOT BUY!

This game is blatantly advertised wrong.

Most of the features listed as "Career Features" are not included in the game. I have the feeling that the description is more accurate to the (by far superior) predecessor Wrestling Spirit 2.

Unfortunately you may sink hours into the editor (trying to include reallife stats and such) and creating your own wrestler with the moveset you see fit, before you even get into your first day of your career, which means that once you figure out how much of an empty shell this game is, you are not eligible for a refund, because you had the program running for more then 2 hours.

So if you want a game like this, with these features I encurage you to head over to greydogsoftware's homepage and buy Wrestling Spirit 2 from their shop (which is ironically even 5$ cheaper then this).

So I'll preface this by saying that while I *do* recommend this game, it is a very niche sort of title so not everyone will enjoy it. Those that will enjoy it, will enjoy it a lot.

Here's what it is; if you've played any of the 'Total Extreme Wrestling' games, or its older free version called "Extreme Warfare Revenge', it is similar. In fact it uses the same in game world, promotions, and wrestlers. But rather then taking the role of a booker and handling all the behind the scenes stuff, you actually step into the role of a wrestler as you guide the wrestler through their career.

You have multiple modes for this, either a career mode where you can take control of any wrestler in the game, or the more difficult "Rookie To Legend" mode, where you create a wrestler from scratch and set out to make your name in the independent scene and get signed with larger and larger companies, as you carve out your legacy.

The career mode works like this; choose an available storyline, wrestle in four matches spanning the four weeks of a month, hope you succeed in said story, then repeat. As you win matches you get experience points you can spend on upgrading your stats, or save them up to buy special attributes to give yourself other bonuses. Winning the storylines gets you popularity which you can use to get signed into new companies.

KEEP IN MIND, that at the start, especially in the "Rookie" mode you will be severely outmatched by a lot of your opposition, similar to an old school wrestling game like "Here Comes The Pain". You'll have to persevere, cherishing the few victories you get and improving your stats correctly to succeed. At the time of this writing, I am seven months in with a record of 10 wins, 20 losses, with two storylines that didn't succeed or fail, several that I failed outright, and ZERO I managed to succeed in. This isn't an easy play for sure.

The character creation is awesome, as you can choose your size, and your style and depending on what you end up going with, you can only choose certain moves. No 280 pound guys doing shooting star presses here, at least not from what I've seen. You have a crazy amount of moves you can choose from, and you can work in almost any pro wrestling region, from Canada to the UK to Japan. It's not something you'll be dissapointed in.

BUT the big part of all this, is the actual gameplay. It is essentially a turn based wrestling game. Without getting too deep into percentages and dice rolls and all the calculations, you choose a move to attack your opponent with, hope it succeeds and then continue the attack. If they block it or counter it, they go on the offensive so then you need to counter or avoid their attack. However it takes into account things like being outside of the ring, being in the corner, your opponent being on the ground, etc. It's very, VERY, in depth and requires a lot of thinking on your part.

I will point out this is all text based, with no music or sound to go with it so make sure you have a great soundtrack to listen to as you play. You also have a couple of other modes based around the matches without any career stuff, such as an exhibition mode, a league mode for singles and tag teams, and a streak mode where you try to go undefeated for as long as possible. Cool but it's not where the meat of the package is. Lastly, one of the big *in game* achievements calls for you to go through career mode for 25 years, win 1000 matches, and a lot of other crazy ♥♥♥♥ so whether you get it on sale for $5 like I did, or pay the regular cost, you're gonna get a great 'dollars versus hours' ratio on this.

Honestly the best bet for you, reading this, is that if you aren't sure, do the following: buy the game, get yourself into a match or two and play around with it. If you like it, great. If not, get your refund within the two hours. It's not for everyone but if you can get into it, you'll find a slightly frustrating but very enjoyable wrestling experience.

this is tough to review, personally i love the game, however i do have to say buyer beware, this game is NOT for everybody. do research before buying. its a very specific type of game that markets to one demographic of players. if you aren't in the text based wrestling sims player demographic, prepare for a bad time. likewise, if you ARE in that demographic this game is fun and interesting.

Long story short, the game is what is, and if you dont like it thats fine, it wasnt made for you in mind. This game was made with a very specific type of gamer, it just so happens that I am one of those types.

The learning curve for this game is steep. The ability to counter moves supposedly is simple, but the random dice rolls destroy any chance of you actually mounting a defense.

An example would be blocking. They compare your strength to your opponents strike, and then generate a random # to compare it to your opponent's strike score. If your strength is 478 and your opponent's is 20, that would mean you should have a decent chance to block right?

Wrong. He potatoed me a couple of times, and I was rolling 23s and 46s out of 200 or even 1000.

Your starting character is just above the enhancement talent, but even then, you struggle to beat them.

I was more looking for a game where you book matches, and tell a story in the ring to get crowd reaction, as opposed to just selecting moves and hoping for the best. I could play the WWE game and do what this game does, and have less frustration.

I had initially written a negative review for this game.

But my opinion has changed, the game is great, it just takes a long time to figure out what your supposed to do.

You do require a lot of patience to figure this one out, but for me it is totally worth it.

Although The Rng Fighting system seems a little unfair at times, as well as Wrestling Spirit 2 being a much better entrant to the series,the crew at Grey Dog compensate that with an infinite amount of ways to customize each wrestler, including the move-set, Want Andre The giant to be able to do a Hurricanrana? Do it! Want Rey Misterio jr to make The Worm his finisher? Do it!You can edit Workers during the game to be able to simulate age decline if you're not a fan of how the game does it, as well as changing their names and home regions.All in all,Wrestling Spirit 3 is, at the very least, an ok way to spend 20$.
7/10

Edit: I should say that you have to mod in real-world wrestlers. But the cornell-verse of workers that Mr. Ryland has come up with is rather good too

Bad game.
Too much crashes.
And too expensive.

First of all this is not TEW so do not buy this game thinking since it's from the same people that you're getting the same game, because these are different. Instead of booking you're well uh starting off as an indy wrestler, which actually sounds kind of cool on paper but this game is absolutely worse than what it's advertised. The game's system itself doesn't seem to be very skill based but instead it seems to be entirely luck, which it's fine, when it is fair, I seem to have a good match here and there but then I get these matches where I get destroyed and have no idea on how I can actually get back into the flow of the match because the A.I. is so OP that I can't do much except take the beating and hope the next match is good. I see people comparing this to the "WWE 2k career mode" but in my honest opinion I would rather play through 2k18's career mode than this, actually I take that back 18's career was bad but I would rather play 15's though. Would I recommend this, well yes and no, for 19.99 (USD) H E double hockey sticks no, for 0.25 (USD) maybe for a half hour for some fun and awful moments.

game mechanic does not make sense. person has the highest states gets to perform a move succesfully with the addition of the gaming adding numbers to even things out. i faced an opponent that had a speed of 60 whilst mine was 490 so the maximum number the points added are 200 so even if he received a 200 buff, i should still be able to reverse his moves. but guess what? this game sucks the AI ***** so bad that he managed to counter it not once but 5 times! don't buy this game, system is completely biased and will not bring you any fun whatsoever, it'll only bring you anger and headaches and therefore I am giving it a 3/10 for a wonderful concept but the gameplay just does not work