Do any of these names sound familiar to you: Jerry Lawler, Jimmy Snuka, The Road Warriors, or the ever-popular Hulk Hogan? If you're a long time fan of Professional Wrestling they should. They are names of popular wrestlers from years past. In Legends of Wrestling, Acclaim gives you the chance to play as these towering warriors, while they were still in their prime. While the premise is definitely interesting and has a lot of potential, weak gameplay overshadows all of its good points.

In the pretty pictures department Legends definitely shines. Each wrestler expresses their individual look and attitude to a 't'. Every move is performed smoothly and flawlessly. The rings themselves are varied and convincing. As usual however, the crowd remains an unconvincing bunch of cutout dolls. The most impressive thing in the visuals department has to be the custom wrestler creator. You are given immense flexibility to tweak out the way your wrestler looks. I was actually able to construct a convincing wrestler form of 'Kefka' from Final Fantasy VI; this should give you some idea of the kind of variety you can get out of this thing.

As far as the audio side of things goes it's all pretty basic. All the slaps, slams, groans, hits, cheers, and boos sound convincing. Every wrestler has accurate playings of his (or her) theme music when they enter the ring. The only thing really lacking was unique sounds, jeers, or monologues for any of the wrestlers.

Unless you're a big wrestling fan, the gameplay is not going to keep your interest very long; it just doesn't hold up by itself. Gameplay is always the most important aspect of any game and unfortunately for Legends, this is its weakest area. Whether you pick Single, Tag-Team, Exhibition, Tournament, or Career mode, all matches play exactly the same regardless of game mode. At the most basic level, gameplay consists of two guys (or teams) performing various wrestling maneuvers on the other until one is able to pin the other. You can walk up and start throwing various punches or kicks, perform a quick throw, or grapple with the opponent and perform a more complicated maneuver on them. You are also given a small window of time to counter most of these moves. This all sounds far more fun than it really is. While it's entertaining at first, the slow pace and lack of variety between matches wears out the fun pretty quickly. Each wrestler has a completely different repertoire of moves, but this is really just an aesthetic difference and does little to change the actual gameplay. Because the matches tend to be very slow-paced, it all becomes very tiresome after three or four matches.

The computer opponents pose very little challenge to any fairly seasoned gamer. Career mode boasts some of the hardest opponents near the end, but only very young children will find it too difficult to handle. After a few minutes of fighting, the computer begins to use the same set of moves repeatedly. Since you know exactly what the game is going to throw at you, you'll know how to counter every time and the fights quickly become trivial.

There are three ways to get into the action: an Exhibition match, a Tournament, or through Career mode. All three sport the same three match styles, one on one, tag team, or tag belt. The control scheme is very intimidating at first, but works surprisingly well considering it's initial complexity. The A button is used to perform simple punches and kicks and the Y button performs quick sweeps and throws. B blocks, R runs, and L is used to move in and out of the ring. The digital pad is used for some of the more interesting maneuvers such as calling in your tag team partner to cheat, picking up a weapon, or performing a finishing move.

The X button boasts the most complex purpose and is the meat of most matches. The X button grapples your opponent into a hold and from there you can choose to do what you like with him, using the A, B, Y, X, and R buttons to perform a wide range of specialized wrestling moves. You can also use the Z button to turn your opponent around in the grapple, giving you a completely new set of painful techniques to inflict massive pain.

While Legends of Wrestling boasts some beautiful visuals and an extremely powerful character creator, it's the gameplay that matters in the end. Unless you're a hardcore fan of many of the old wrestlers, Legends simply won't be able to keep your attention. If you ARE a hardcore fan, you're still probably better off picking up a newer title, like Wrestlemania X8.