Despite relative improvements in presentation, WWE 2K16 ultimately makes a crucial mistake when it comes to understanding professional wrestling: the fiction is a lot more fun than the reality.
MLB 15: The Show is remarkable in that it adheres to a method of gameplay that's absent in most sports games. By privileging patience, attention to detail, and creating a system that rewards minor adjustments to the way we play (not unlike strategy adjustments in the real life MLB), MLB 15: The Show remains one of the only sports games on the market that not only has a distinctive and engaging look and feel, but also pushes an admirable ideology that, however subtly, explores how we engage with sports and videogames.
This isn't a game of jump scares, but it is one of dread. When you're running from a herd of volatiles, and you look behind you and see them all chomping at your heels, there's a rush of adrenaline.
For a videogame based on grown men and women in spandex fighting each other while forwarding overblown soap opera storylines, WWE 2k15 is surprisingly misanthropic. The game seeks to be a "realistic" portrayal of the WWE career arc, asking you to grind your way from an unknown to a Superstar, and finally winning the WWE Championship. WWE 2k15 certainly propagates that fantasy, but along the way, it also stumbles into a repetitive pattern that, completely by accident, reveals a harsher and poignant truth about what professional wrestling, and being a sports entertainment performer, really is: it's a job, just like any other job.
By leaning off the broadcast qualities adopted by so many other titles, MLB '14: The Show emphasizes not the baseball that we know but the baseball that we love.