
The normal pace of the mode of sped up and it being more loose with objectives makes it essentially a fun, interactive expansive tutorial with a nice story behind it.Ĭena’s pre and post-match narration adds a lot of context to the matches for newer fans, while also offering insight into the matches that he hasn’t really gone into in video form until now.

John Cena’s self-awareness and ability to poke fun at himself makes this such a fun showcase to complete, which is a nice accomplishment. Other than the lack of OVW and UPW matches, despite having The Prototype character in the game, the Showcase mode is still a stellar runthrough of many of Cena’s classic rivalries. Cena’s Prototype character is here, but sadly without his OVW partner Rico Constantino, who had tremendous comedic chemistry with him. Miz UPW match recreated even if it was just done under a generic indie company name and not UPW. Sadly, there’s no Cena UPW documentary mini-game where he loads up on steak while shopping, but it would have been neat to have an early Cena vs.
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I found that taking a small break was all I needed because the mode shifted from era to era frequently - so you start off with the One Night Stand 2006 match with RVD and then go into his 2002 WWE TV debut against Kurt Angle. Here, the matches are so quick to complete that in an hour it’s possible to make sizable progress through it and be surprised looking back that you took out a handful of matches in a single pass. Last year’s showcase was outstanding because it captured so many different eras of Rey Mysterio’s career that we haven’t seen replicated in a 2K game and even that one was best-played across several days to avoid burnout. John Cena’s ability to poke fun at himself makes this showcase a blast to play through in a single sitting and that’s something I’ve never done with them before. The game itself is also finely-tuned like 2K22 was, so unlike 2K20, where you could start a match and then the game would freak out and you’d have to restart it, there’s nothing like that to be worried about here.
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Each match has about a dozen objectives, but they’re split up into groups of two at a time, so they feel less daunting than before and the pause menu guides players into how to accomplish each objective. While that part is still true, the amount of objectives in each match has gone down. Prior incarnations of the mode were hurt by having not only a lot of in-match objectives to hit, but also tying things like creation parts to them. Cena jokes about taking that beating alongside others with the idea being that he’s looking through his past and viewing every loss as a learning experience - which is actually a sound piece of life advice that nicely comes through in video game form. WWE 2K23 aims to go for a looser recreation of classic matches and unlike some superstars who may not want to look weak in a video game representation, this mode is all about playing as people that beat John Cena - including in violent fashion like Brock Lesnar at Summerslam 2014.

This is especially true for things like Attitude-era brawls on the floor and announce table attacks, where you had things that were largely now commonplace in games being a part of it and could be replicated easily - while things like elaborate finishing sequences and careful body positioning were best left to being recreated in motion capture form. The advantage to this approach is that when it worked well with things that could be done in a game, it felt like you were playing through history. These modes have attempted to recreate real-life parts of matches with the game engine in cutscenes that couldn’t be done in real-time, while also trying to do the matches beat-for-beat as much as possible.
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It has also been used to highlight historical moments in pro wrestling history, like last year’s Rey Mysterio-centric Showcase featuring Eddie Guerrero vs. John Cena match on Velocity a decade before that match would be something you would main event a major PPV with. Over the past decade, this approach has led to interesting historical curiosities being put into a game - like the first Bryan Danielson vs. The Showcase modes in WWE games have often been a mix of good intentions and a disappointing end result due to their attempt at note-for-note recreations of the past.
