It’s still March as I finish this, which means it is time for the new WWE 2k game! Last year’s edition saw the addition of a new open world mode, The Island, to go along with the usual other featured game modes (Universe, Showcase, My Faction, and My Rise) and had a couple of special editions centered around the Undertaker and the Bloodline. This year’s edition brings all of that back and is centered around cover boy CM Punk, with two special Editions focused on HHH and the Monday Night Wars. While making a Monday Night Wars edition seems kinda silly without Sting, Chris Jericho or Edge & Christian…some of the main participants (Hulk Hogan, Scott Hall, Randy Savage) are no longer with us and the target audience is getting older so you can’t wait around until all of those other guys are contractually free to join back up and participate to take another bite at the apple. Thankfully, the magic of the create a wrestler suite and the hard work of all the creators out there make it possible to add the missing people in later along with anyone else you might want to play with (every year I download the Four Horsemen, the Road Warriors and the Midnight Express along with several AEW wrestlers once somebody has made a good model of them to use).
There are several new and returning forms of matches to this edition as well. The Inferno match has returned at long last, and the Dumpster Match, I Quit Match, and 3 Stages of Hell (where you get to pick all three of the stages) have been added. The I Quit Match has a different functionality than the Submission Match that’s kinda wonky, and I’m still working on mastering. But the added wrinkle of being able to have the referee ask the opponent ask the opponent if they quit is an important distinction from the Submission match. There’s also a new weapon in the form of thumbtacks, which you get to let lay out on the mat and you can see embedded in the wrestlers after they land on them! There’s a blood splatter graphic for when someone gets busted open, if you’re into that kind of thing. And finally this edition also has a lot of new features added to the existing game modes, and as we all know that kind of thing can either make the game better or worse. Which way did this one go? I’m going to tell you, of course.
If your curious, here’s what I thought about WWE 2K25.
The Roster has some big changes to it. The RAW, Smackdown, and NXT Superstars are minus anyone who was released some time during 2025, as usual, and some people who moved up from NXT during the year are now fully designated to RAW or Smackdown. The most recent NXT call ups – Trick Williams, Oba Femi, Je’Von Evans, and Jordynne Grace – are still n NXT but everyone else is where they currently are on TV. The legends roster is mostly intact but a few big names are missing – Bruno Sammartino, Ricky Steamboat, and Jake Roberts. But the biggest additions are from AAA, which WWE bought last year. Several of AAA’s luminaries have been added to the game roster along with some of their title belts and arenas. Not having Jake, Ricky or Bruno any more is a bummer for me but I love the other moves.
Universe Mode has a lot of great new features. One that we’ve been waiting a long time for is the ability to import created tag teams from the general gameplay roster. I can’t tell you how annoying it was to have to recreate every tag team that you made for exhibitions whenever you wanted to build a new universe. But now once you download Hawk and Animal from the creation suite and put them together on the game roster, or swap out the members of Judgement Day or the MFTs based on real life changes, you don’t have to do it over and over again each time you create a new Universe. If you haven’t used Universe Mode then this may sound trivial to you but trust me, it’s a big deal.
But that’s not the only thing. You can now start your Universe at any point in the year instead having to begin the week after WrestleMania, and you can select or unselect TV shows and PLEs in the setup phase instead of having to delete them manually. And finally there is the ‘watch’ option where you play an episode of TV or a PLE as if you are watching a real one, without being sent back to the show lineup between matches. That is a Godsend for anyone who likes to stream their Universe or put it up on YouTube, because now you don’t have to deal with the awkward pauses between matches to select things or spoiling an angle you booked by showing people the loading screen before it happens. All in all, an A+ for the upgrades here.
GM Mode also has some changes. The calendar has gone back to 50 weeks instead of 25 that it had shrunk down to; while that sometimes feels a bit long I’ll take it over the 25 week year which was way too short for my tastes. The menu of match options has expanded greatly to include most of the available options from the exhibition menu, you can put as many as 8 people in a match now and do triple threat tag team matches, you can book wrestlers to do a promo and a match on the same show and there are some new power cards that you can use to boost yourself or attack your opponents. This is the best version of GM Mode by far since they brought it back.
My Faction is back, with one big change. Now you can do intergender matches, which go similar to Tekken or Mortal Kombat style fights in terms of what you can do to each other. And let me tell you, that is a huge help. In previous editions you could only do single gender matches, which screwed you out of certain opportunities that require a certain style of playing card if you only had one of the opposite gender. If you’ve gotten hooked on My Faction like me, it’s like a whole brand new day.
The Island, an open world feature that was added last year, has a new storyline to it. Instead of fighting to climb the ranks in the Bloodline, you are now dealing with an Island where the order has fallen and three new camps are vying for supremacy. You choose which order you want to join – either Punk’s Anarchy, Cody Rhodes’ Tradition or Rhea Ripley’s Shadows – and go through the respective path laid out for each one.
Showcase Mode is what it always is. This time it features CM Punk, with AJ Lee as an unlockable character. Nothing new here really.
Other stuff
This year’s edition has become known for a big, controversial change that is nothing more than a money grab. The unlockable characters, arenas, etc that are usually there to play immediately if you get the Ringside Pass, are now locked in a tiered order until you get enough XP to reach the next level and unlock another batch. So if you want to use them immediately you have to pay again to skip ahead and unlock them without playing.
I’m not here to defend that practice but I will say that if you play the game early and often, and play it all year until the next edition comes out like I do, it’s really not so bad! Just playing at the times that I usually do during the day, I unlocked 28 of the 40 levels in just a couple of weeks. I did end paying to skip a few levels at the beginning and end but that was because I needed some people and things for the Universe that I run. Racking up XP is real easy, especially if you play all of the different game modes, and you can get XP in GM Mode even if you don’t play any of the matches you set up.
Now if you don’t play it a lot, and only do exhibitions, and you just want to be able to use everyone on the game whenever you decide to give it a whirl then yes, it’s a bridge too far. The casual gamer who’s a WWE fan should be able to use Bret Hart from day one if they paid for access to everything in the game. But there is a way around all this. The creation suite has great replicas of everyone and everything you might be looking for. If you’re not stuck on having the official versions of everyone on the game roster then the creation suite versions will more than suffice.
Overall grade: A
The only knocks I have are some of the roster decisions, and the unlocking system. The updates and upgrades to the different game modes have brought multiple big improvements across the board, leading to a much better game than previous editions. So if you’re a regular player and purchaser of this game then I highly recommend it.
Stroke of Genius 