Kyle Fowle
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.