In RetroMania Wrestling you can attack certain limb areas of the body, perform submission movies, finishing moves, and much more. No longer are you restricted to just a bodyslam, a backdrop, a running clothesline, and a few other moves. I say almost because while the core gameplay feels very familiar, however, the move-list has been expanded upon tenfold. If you’ve ever played the original WWF WrestleFest, you will feel almost instantly at home with RetroMania Wrestling. Well technically, RetroMania Wrestling does have a current WWE Superstar, who was presumably acquired prior to his return to WWE in 2020. Granted RetroMania Wrestling perhaps lacks the WWE license that it may have hoped for, but instead, they’ve filled the roster with pro wrestlers of yesteryear and modern indie pro wrestlers of today. In 2019, developer Retrosoft Studios acquired the license to WWF WrestleFest from Arc System Works who held the rights to the original arcade game. At first, I assumed that RetroMania Wrestling was a “spiritual successor”, but I am gladly mistaken. So here we are 30 years later and we’ve finally got the official sequel to WWF WrestleFest. Though to be fair if you search WWE WrestleFest on YouTube, you’ll soon see why this game was cancelled. WWF WrestleFest was released way back in 1991 and since that time we’ve had an abomination of a mobile game in 2012 and there was even a sequel to this arcade classic that was announced for PS3 and Xbox 360 but never actually released. Still, I can quite proudly say to this day, that the Royal Rumble mode of WWF WrestleFest was one of the few arcade games that I’ve ever finished. Well in those days you’d practically be giving your money away as the difficulty of arcade games were deliberately difficult so that it would swallow your money. The latter of the above titles, namely WWF WrestleFest was a game I’d spend a silly amount playing in the arcades. It was a place where I’d spend the vast majority of my small amount of pocket money on games such as TMNT: The Arcade Game, Spider-Man: The Video Game, Street Fighter 2, Mortal Kombat, WWF Superstars, and WWF WrestleFest. I’m now old enough to remember proper video game arcades in the UK.

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