I immediately knew that my social life was destined for ruin when developer Spike Chunsoft officially unveiled Fire Pro Wrestling World during Game Developers Conference 2017. The acclaimed Fire Pro franchise, which dates back to the late, great PC Engine, is the rare series that includes multiple aspects of what I love about the video game medium in nearly every release: satisfying action, mind-tickling simulation, and a playpen in which my imagination can roam free. The $29.99 Fire Pro Wrestling World is the first series entry to appear as a PC game, and the options that the personal computer affords are magnificent and many.
Fire Pro Wrestling World began life in 2018 as essentially a beta featured in Valve’s Steam Early Access program. Despite its incomplete nature, the game showed much promise with its trademark, collar-and-elbow, timing-based grappling mechanics and simple control scheme. That promise sprouted into something beautiful, despite some new and legacy annoyances. With its deep customization, smooth online play, and many modes, Fire Pro Wrestling World is the best wrasslin’ game on PC.
Backstage Antics
Though Fire Pro Wrestling World looks like a simple title, thanks to its retro 2D sprites, complex systems lurk beneath its hood. Spike Chunsoft designed the game so that matches resemble real-world sports entertainment bouts. You’re supposed to work your opponents with light moves at the beginning of a match, move on to medium-strength moves as you wear them down a bit, and then bust out your haymakers—high-impact maneuvers and finishers—after they’re properly beaten down. Certainly, you can attempt your deadliest moves as soon as the opening bell rings, but they’re likely to get reversed or countered by stamina-filled opponents. This system gives matches a sense of momentum, as the wrestlers build from feeling each other out to delivering big slams.
Resting is a vital pacing component, too. You can’t bust out move after move without consequence—your wrestler suffers fatigue over the course of a contest. Fire Pro Wrestling World, like its predecessors, lacks visible health bars or stamina meters, so you must observe your grapplers’ body language to gauge their fatigue state. A few huffs and puffs indicate that your wrestler is tired, but functional; if she hunches over and sucks in air, she’s completely winded and will be put on her back by any move. You can stave off tiredness by making your wrestler rest at regular intervals by tapping the dedicated breathe button. This energy management may sound a bit tedious, but it adds another layer of strategy and tension. After all, many truly great pro wrestling bouts feature moments where the drama comes from seeing which grappler can simply get to his or her feet first.
Hitting the Ramp
Fire Pro Wrestling World offers a variety of gameplay modes to keep your interest. There are the standard singles and tag-team matches, as well as many delightful gimmick matches. You can fight inside a steel cage, engage in UFC-style Gruesome Fighting, go hardcore in a Landmine Deathmatch or Barbed Wire Deathmatch (which were made popular in the “garbage” promotions like Big Japan Pro Wrestling and Frontier Martial Arts Wrestling), enter tournaments and leagues, mix it up in battle royale and tornado matches, and fight under Spike Chunsoft’s original S-1 rules (which emulate the defunct K-1 kickboxing promotion’s rule set) or SWA rules (which resemble the guidelines set by the Pancrase hybrid wrestling promotion). In short, there’s a lot to do. In a nice touch, you can play others online in single, tag, or battle royale matches.
On that note, Fire Pro Wrestling World’s netcode is quite good; after more than 60 hours with the game, I can happily say that I’ve rarely encountered a laggy contest. You can play against other people in ranked (Cement) or unranked (Pro Wrestling) matches, too, though Spike Chunsoft needs to change the option names to make them clearer to the uninitiated. Fire Pro Wrestling World also keeps track of your win-loss record, as well as the percentage-based match rating that judges how well you put on a show.
PPV-Worthy Moves
Fire Pro Wrestling World’s contests are filled with a ridiculous array of wrestling moves, from the basic to the brutal. They include simple and advanced strikes, lariats, joint locks, slams, top-rope moves, and brutal maneuvers, such as The Burning Hammer and Tiger Driver ’91.
New to Fire Pro Wrestling World are Okite Yaburi and the ability to exchange blows in a fun, random no-sell sequence. Okite Yaburi lets you steal your opponent’s finishing move once per match in a massive sign of disrespect. So, if you’re using a Shawn Michaels Edit, for example, you can powerbomb Kevin Nash using his own jackknife powerbomb special move (more on Edits and Edit Points in a bit). The blow exchange sees a pair of wrestlers trade punches, kicks, or chops without wincing until one of them delivers a finishing blow; the wrestler who wins the exchange is determined by how fast the person controlling it can mash buttons during the sequence. It’s amazing that a title with such simple visuals can accurately replicate the look and feel of American-, Mexican-, and Japanese-style professional wrestling more so than the big-budget WWE 2K releases.
Fire Pro Wrestling World includes several default fake wrestlers, but you probably won’t touch them outside of the Mission Mode. The in-depth Mission Mode is a tutorial that helps newcomers acclimate themselves to Fire Pro Wrestling World’s gameplay by tasking them with achieving set goals with the default roster. The goals include learning the lock-up timing, executing a basic move, and doing a diving attack from the top rope to an opponent that’s positioned outside of the ring. If you’ve never played a Fire Pro game, Mission Mode is a good place to start.That said, even Fire Pro veterans should give Mission Mode a go, as playing it unlocks new moves and Edit Points that you use to build your custom wrestlers. I am not a fan of that. I’ve been playing Fire Pro religiously since the Dreamcast version (the legendary Fire Pro D!), so locking moves and Edit Points behind a practice mode is an annoyance.
Most moves are pretty cool, but Fire Pro Wrestling World continues the series’ long, rich history of subpar striking. You must be perfectly aligned with your opponent to land many punches and kicks, which can be frustrating if you have a boxer or mixed martial artist who relies on strikes to do damage. You can reduce the number of whiffs by outfitting your fighter with quick, straight shots. Punches or kicks with wind-up animations are very easy for the opposition to avoid.
Superstar Edits
Edits, or wrestlers you create, are a big part of the Fire Pro experience. As in previous games, Fire Pro Wrestling World includes the faces, hairstyles, move sets, and outfits of many popular real-world wrestlers, so that diligent community members can wade through the many Edit menus and cobble together the likes of Asuka, Hulk Hogan, Kenta Kobashi, and hundreds of other male and female grapplers. New to Fire Pro Wrestling World is the ability to apply up to nine layers to each edit part, giving you lots of room to let your imagination run wild. Bob Ross (the notable Joy of Painting artist), Krang (from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles), and Scorpion (from the Mortal Kombat games) are some of the more imaginative, coolest-looking Edits I’ve seen online.
The customization options go far deeper than appearance, however. You can make your Edit a technician, a shooter, a heel, a high-flyer, or any other professional wrestling style. You can also assign voices to their moves in case you want your wrestler to, say, yell when performing a moonsault splash. Adding skills, such as Movement Speed and Recovery, or offensive and defensive strength parameters, costs Edit Points. You start with enough Edit Points to make a skilled wrestler, but you unlock many more as you play the game.
One of Fire Pro Wrestling World’s many updates brought digital music support, so you can add your favorite tunes to the game as an entrance theme or background music. The game supports MP3, OGG, and WAV files, so you have many ways for Hulk Hogan to come out to “Real American.”
In fact, Fire Pro Wrestling World gives you too many Edit Points. One of my favorite Edit grapplers, Lance Manyon, has 293 Edit points, which makes him an unstoppable beast who tramples the competition. As a result, I cap Manyon’s Edit Point total at 243 points to give other players a fighting chance. Come at me, bro.
With Fire Pro Wrestling World, you can give your finisher a name, much like the real-world pros. For example, when Lance Manyon wins a match via a superkick (his finishing move), it’s listed on the win screen as The Show’s Over. It’s a nice touch. And, of course, as in other Fire Pro games, finishing moves and other designated moves Critical, meaning that they instantly knock out an opponent. This is long-running Fire Pro element adds a potential surprise to every bout, as Criticals are random and come seemingly out of nowhere.
In addition, you can create championship belts, rings, and referees, too, and share them via Steam Workshop (more on that in a bit). For comparison, RetroMania Wrestling—an arcade-style wrestling game for PC—has no such customization.
Three-Count Bout
In addition to the aforementioned customization, you can program your creation’s CPU Logic so that the wrestler fights in a way that you envision. For example, if Lance Manyon tosses a foe outside of the ring, he’ll rarely go after them to continue the brawl; in my headcanon, he prefers to fight on the mat. Instead, he’ll taunt them from afar. He also goes headhunting with superkicks whenever an opponent is in a severely weakened state. CPU Logic not only gives your wrestler a wonderful sense of personality, but it also allows creators to recreate famous spots. I once faced a Hulk Hogan Edit who body slammed my wrestler, ran to the opposite rope, and rebounded with a match-ending Leg Drop. I couldn’t be mad at that, despite taking the L.
The Steam Workshop takes the marvelous Edit process and enhances it by letting you share your creations with others in the Fire Pro Wrestling World community. Other people can subscribe to your Edits from within the Fire Pro Wrestling World Steam Workshop, so that they can import your creations into their matches. In addition, any changes you publish are automatically downloaded to subscribers’ PCs in the background, so they always have the most recent version of your characters. Spike Chunsoft has stated that you can store as many Edits as your PC’s storage allows.
Let’s Talk DLC
As Spike Chunsoft moved Fire Pro Wrestling World out of Steam Early Access, the developer added 12 DLC packages that expanded the base game (one free, 11 paid). For example, the $19.99 Fire Promoter lets you play Fire Pro as a booker managing a wrestling promotion. This, honestly, should’ve been part of the base game. However, the $19.99 New Japan Pro Wrestling Collaboration adds 39 wrestlers and several Edit parts and themes. I’m glad that it’s not part of the base game, so that if Spike Chunsoft loses the NJPW license, the entire game won’t vanish with it.
In all, there’s more than $100 worth of DLC on top of the $29.99 base game. That’s a lot of cash to spend to enjoy the complete Fire Pro Wrestling World package.
Can Your PC Run Fire Pro Wrestling World?
Fire Pro Wrestling World isn’t a demanding game, as you may have surmised from the visuals. To run the sports game, your PC needs at least an Intel Core i5 CPU, a DirectX 9-capable GPU (with 512MB of video memory), 4GB of RAM, 4GB of storage, and the Windows 7 operating system.
The game performed well in testing. My gaming PC, a rig that houses an Intel Core i5 processor and Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti graphics card, pushed Fire Pro Wrestling World at 60 frames per second.
As a Steam game, Fire Pro Wrestling World supports game controllers, Remote Play on Phones, Remote Play on Tablets, Remote Play Together, Steam Achievements, and Steam Cloud Saves.
The People’s Champ
Fire Pro Wrestling World sees the series return to excellent form after the embarrassment that was the avatar-based, Xbox 360-exclusive Fire Pro Wrestling. World has all of the elements that comprise a great Fire Pro game—excellent creation tools, a deep move set, tight controls, wild game modes—and adds online play and Steam Workshop integration. It’s a stellar package, even with the questionable striking and over-designed menu system.
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