Believr Pro Wrestling

I decided to scribble down thoughts as I played through the game (which I note remains early access)... ‣ That opening screen has wicked music - a cinematic video to the right introducing the main characters of this universe would have really got me hyped up. ‣ This is the exact kind of interface people (wrongly) assumed we'd be getting with TEW IX - it's clean, modern and well though out. ‣ I hate the name of the game and the logos - they look like the worst kind of AI and "Believr" just makes me thing AI made a typo. I'm not against the use of AI to generate graphics and characters - I just think they could be a lot better than the are. For these, honestly, just hire a graphic designer to do all the companies and events - it'll make a huge difference to how the game is received. Then use AI for the characters by all means. ‣ First screen I'm met with a blurry image of a character as part of a headline - these don't need to be blurry. It makes the game look low budget. Go for beautiful full res - we want to get to know the characers. ‣ I can't cope with all the varied cropping of the character portraits. Have them all cropped the same way with consistent framing. It'll make a huge difference. ‣ Makes my neck ache on an ultrawide monitor. Lots of dead space. ‣ The Universe is obviously where, once the general gameplay is at a standard, this needs the most attention to have this able to compete with the lore of competitor games. For example, I start with GWD and don't have a single tag team "encoded" ‣ The character images look interesting - let me click them to make them bigger so I can see them or, just flatly make them bigger to start with. ‣ WAY too many men in crop tops for my liking. I'll consider these character renders as placeholders for now - because I suspect the community will help flesh this out with more interesting ones over time, as they have with other similar games. ‣ I like that the characters don't seem to be based on real world counterparts. It is its own universe - that is a big appeal. ‣ The split out of various wrestling styles in the stats was a good choice - it's a real limitation of PWS and a strength of TEW. It also helps to really establish characters personas - BUT, some just flatly didn't make sense. 6'5" giants who are incredible high flyers but look like tanks...and vice versa. ‣ The women seem more diverse, interesting and cropped consistently than the men, but not everybody needs to stand with their hands on their hips. The men - there seems an awful lot of "biker gang" aesthetic going on. ‣ I like the idea of being able to give people the kind of tagline/gimmick/role. I didn't love that often it's just the gimmick, then those words printed on a t-shirt in the images. It feels a bit reductive. ‣ No pre-assigned staff roles?! That needs resolving ASAP. And the fact there are so few available and you literally just click a button to hire them is....not what I expected. I never got to see any kind of contract negotiation of staff/wrestlers - I'll assume that comes in a later update. ‣ Similar story with wrestlers - no free agents - nobody out of contract - no means of negotiating. No distinction between PPA / written contracts. ‣ Lack of existing events is a pain - it's part of each company's identity and would better help me get an understanding of the game world. Looking forward to that in a future update. ‣ "Business" side of things is obviously a long way from completion, so I'll just ignore that for now. Most informaiton rather than the ability to be able to really change or affect anything. ‣ Transition betwen some screens is clunky and slow. I'd also like to see, if I click on a character profile for example, for that to pop in a window. Being able to have multiple windows open alongside one another will make a lot of things a lot easy to navigate. ‣ Top guys need to look like Top Guys. Leo Alvarez, Hank Carter, Mirage...these guys don't look like "the best of the best", but they are presented as stuff. If they're top of the tree at major promotions, they should be presented as such. ‣ "bxhbfx" is the owner of Above All Pro Wrestling?! Huh? ‣ Lack of character biographies and lore behind who they are, how they got there, how they all relate to one another - HUGE task - but a vital one to competer with the Cornellverse. Don't "get to it" - get a professional writer in now to start working on this concurrently with game development. Or even a committed genre enthusiast or diary writer. ‣ Booking a match - ok this has promise, but it's very early WIP. Does every match HAVE to have an aftermath event for example?! I think the UI could be made much easier where you can add in key beats, rather than seeing all of them regardless of whether you select them or not. ‣ When I'm booking a match, let me easily access the profiles of the people I'm searching. I want to see their stats, not have to search for them in the right hand menu. ‣ Tag Team Auto naming of segments puts the wrong tag teams together. ‣ Aftermath options don't match the commentary. ‣ Basically everybody has 100 stamina. ‣ Booked my first show..."NEXT UP:" filled the screen. I couldn't do a damned thing. Literally nothing to click. No key press got me out of it. Eventually worked out I had to press the middle button on my mouse. ‣ No idea how the booking works. Seems to ask you to pick a winner, then resets everything beneath it. Don't appear to be able to choose who takes the loss. ‣ The way it plays through a show in some kind of real time is.....weird. Slow, plodding, not really clear what's going on. I just skipped it in the end. Think I would end up doing that every time to be honest - don't get the point of the "live" play through version as it stands. ‣ Apparently 'Concrete' Cole Driscoll's selling is improving (is the feedback I got on my card from social media) - Cole didn't wrestler on the card... ‣ Agent report is nice principally with lots of info in here, presented well. ‣ Glitch in MARKET PRESENCE at top of screen - there is no decimal limit, meaning it shows a 0.07296248059356096% drop. I think that can round to 2 decimal places! OVERALL VIEW Right now, this is a demo of a future game interface. There's no real game of which to speak. Existing universe is a barren wasteland missing meaning and context, but what HAS been done, at least looks promising. I'm not sure you can really 'play' the game right now, so don't go into it with that expectation. I'll revisit in six months, but right now, I can only say it offers early promise and to keep an eye on how things develop. I can't recommend this game as it stands, but I hope to be able to re-review it in the future and see a much more complete game than is currently present. I think the dev is overstating it to suggest the current game is "fully playable" - it simply isn't a full game at this point, though I applaud the direction it's going in.

[b]Technical comments:[/b] I received a free copy of this game prior to release for the purpose of testing and feedback. I have logged ~20 hours at the time of writing this and have had constant dialog with the developer in which any bugs I've found have been reported and fixed promptly. I can also confirm that my suggestions have all been taken on board, some of which have already been added and others which I have been informed are planned for future BPW releases. [b]Background comments:[/b] Adam (TEW) is deserving of my thanks for introducing me to the genre in the early 00's. I played the hell out of EWR and even managed to find the old DOS style EW/D games, which had their fair share of play time as well. My enjoyment of the genre has unfortunately dwindled over the past 20+ years (yikes!) with each subsequent TEW providing more complexity but less charm. There's an argument to be made that I'd play TEW more if it was available on Steam and had workshop modding (because I have no intention of messing around with their awful e-license and support service again) but it doesn't make up for the visuals and gameplay which are still sorely lacking. PWS has been a somewhat acceptable stand-in for a time, but it's essentially a stat-padded notepad for wrestling fan-fiction. The easy access image packs and fancy UI skins have been propping my opinion of it up for some time. Still, I could book a 6 month storyline in the build to Wrestlemania and the only payoff would be a fractional increase in OVR and a journal full of my own writing. So, no dopamine kick at the end of that rainbow. There's also JoPW which is a lot of fun, but so is playing snake on your old Nokia for a while. At some point you're going to reach for your smartphone. [b]Game comments:[/b] It looks amazing. The UI is clean, the animations are slick and it's very easy on the eyes. The media and socials updates from fans and dirt sheet writers make it feel like you're part of a bigger world. The addition of Epic Moments and Crowd Hooks really support both the in-game development of workers/angles as well as your own storytelling (if like me, you write things down). But the biggest pro has to be running the show. Instead of X vs Y for 10 mins = 60%, you can now plan how you want the match to go and the (text) commentator will give you a play by play when you're running the show. This adds some immersion and brings a bit of life to the show you're running, reading what's happening instead of just the final score. With that said, the game isn't the finished article, though I wouldn't expect it to be given that it's in early access. Contract negotiations, TV deals, Staffing etc. could all do with some dev time (things I've raised with the developer and they have confirmed will be looked at), and some variation in the commentator and auto-promo text would also be nice to see, though I expect that will happen in time anyway. [b]Summary:[/b] I've had a blast playing BPW and expect it will be even more fun when the modding community get behind it and it has a real-world database available. I'm very impressed with what looks to be a solid foundation and it'll be interesting to see what it develops into. This seems to be a passion project for the developer and I was really pleased to see that even some of my ideas made it into the game. Given the dev's interaction on Reddit so far and the fact that there's a direct link to the community on the home screen, it seems as though they're going to be active on this one, so bug fixes, updates and feature suggestions should be regular. With a few more tweaks, this could easily take the top spot in the booking sim genre.

This game is good, and has serious potential, but as things stand, PWS is simply better. The UI, although buggy, is clean and easy to interact with and the detail is great, however, the game is missing basic fundamentals which should have been in day one. 1. Tag team titles Tag team titles is a must. you can create one but only have one holder. Big miss. 2. Interferences You need to create an angle to interrupt matches, but then they dont sync correctly in the show flow. You should be able to add and manage the interference within the match booking itself. 3. Match finishes dont align You have a steel cage match or ladder match, the end result is always a pin fall, not escaping the cage or collecting the item from atop the ring. ruins the immersion. 4. Backroom staff - Personalities or announcers. You hold an interview match angle, but your forced to use two wrestlers as you have no personalities or announces? and you can't edit your angles to only require one wrestler. Overall, Game was released far too early, missing a lot of basic fundamentals which makes a wrestling game great.

This is a very niche game for a niche crowd. Imagine Football manager and Crusader Kings but instead of footballers and king/knights you control the destiny of your Pro Wrestling promotion and its superstars. The amount of detail put into this game, even in its early stages really tells me that it was a wrestling fan who made this and someone who understands the biz on a deeper level than whats on the surface. You can decide your wrestlers promos, match flow, rivalries etc. You can create your own promotion and wrestlers and decide every aspect of their skillset and personality and even what "hook" they use to reel the crowd in. You can upload custom images for you wrestlers, logos, belts and all that. I would also like to commend the dev for taking the time to make patches after release, and working with the community to solve any issues. A real stand up hard working dev who cares about his product. There is a clear vision and roadmap for this title and I love where its going. 5/5 stars for this matchup, I am a total mark for this game =)

Terrible. Like most I'm not a fan of the use of AI art in games. I am willing to put it up with in smaller early access games if I feel the experience is worth my time. But BPW was not worth the 45 minutes I spent with it. For starters, the tutorial is more annoying than helpful. It talks like it's going to ease you into "the flow" of the game, then just proceeds to bombard you with multiple text boxes at once. By that I mean, you'll get a message telling you to perform this one step. Then before you have a chance to perform the step it's asking, you're immediately met with another text box asking you to do the next thing. So if you're anywhere near as scatterbrained as me, by the time you've dismissed the seventh or eighth message and are finally allowed to do something, you've already forgotten the first thing it had asked you to do. The game is also riddled with bugs and lag, as others have pointed out. Half the time I couldn't see any of the different options for match flow because they just wouldn't show for me. And when they finally did, half of them didn't make sense. Why can I only choose pinfall, submission, and disqualification finishes for a FIRST BLOOD match? Am I missing something? I suppose it's possible I am since my time with the game was less than an hour, but again for such a short amount of time it left a really bad impression, and sometimes that's all it takes to turn you off something. Can't recommend in its current state.

It's triggering my anti virus and malware protection software for both the game and the database converter. If you want the database converter, you have to go to a certain part of the game which will direct you to a website to download the converter, I believe it was Mediafire, which popped up ads. There's no Discord for the game and if you want/need help, they want you to go to forums. Database converter pops up numerous command prompts and keeps restarting itself. Very sketchy. Requested a refund right away.

Have not played a great amount, like the time I had in TEW or WMMA but what I have played was very enjoyable and that was before the latest update, which is HUGE, as mentioned I played TEW I was just a young boy in when I first played it, that created a love of literally all sports management games. The dev is so consistent with updates and has with this latest update bringing real world independent promotions into the game means the room for growth is massive, I don't usually leave reviews but watching the amount of updates the dev has done shows the passion they have. If these types of games are your bag, things like PWS or TEW you will love this, at least I really do! Keep up the great work dev cannot wait to see what comes in the future.

This is a very first impression and evolving review of this game if you will but even just 2.5 hrs in and only completed tutorial and putted around the database editor I HAD TO WRITE A REVIEW. I AM BLOWN AWAY AND COMPLETLEY HOOKED. I have yet to find a Wrestling GM game where we can take control beat for beat of a match and storyline and feel like both Vince Mc Mahon and Stone Cold Steve Austin as well as Austin's opponent at the same time. This game does both and IT NEEDS TO DO MORE OF THIS. THIS IS THE GAMES STRONGEST POINT AND WHAT STANDS OUT AND ADDICTS ME THE MOST. It's what i always looked for in a wrestling gm game. Thus in the future you need to have as many match and story beats angles hooks etc as you can think of and allow us to freely create any with unlimited options or close to in the editor and be able to allow us to upload them and download others, especially once this game gets workshop and possibly plug in support. *It NEEDS these to be considered a GOAT wrestling GM game contender in my opinion) I would say i would love to find a Wrestling GM game which basically gave me a full game developer mode with a tutorial on how to do that, but what i mentioned above would easily scratch that itch. I have a lot of ways i'd love to see this game go and would even love to help out any way i can especially creatively but i will leave that for the discussion page discord etc and just do current pros and cons. PROS: Game is constantly developping with weekly updates. The dev or devs are very passionate about this game and want to make this the goat of Wrestling GMS. They got a long way to go but this is a VERY STRONG start for sure. The moment to moment action in both the matches and storylines is highly addicting. How every choice does seem to matter and be based on characters stats is great. (Not sure if these stats can be edited or increase via xp as they do more matches and storylines but that be something id highly like) I like that you can both use AI to auto book anything and even add your own booking templates, or book beat by beat. or do a mixture of all three as well as writing your own lines of dialogue and action beats (I hope the amount of text you can use per beat is not capped at a certain amount. Let me write monologues) Drag and drop items and the modern interface is really well done here. The editor lets you edit almost everything though once you get into specific details you have less editing abilities. CONS: In the segment live play, please add an 10s speed, and a click to skip to next beat and ability to pause beats. I am playing on a patato laptop so this might be why but sometimes from beat to beat was slower than the 15s i had it on, especially after a match win result. Lacks steam work shop Lacks ability to install plug ins. Could not find difficulty setting. The tutorial NEEDS to not just have doing a match but also setting up a story arc, a storyline with beats, hooks angles as from what i have played from wrestling gm games this moment to moment beat creation of matches and storylines needs to be explained to us as its not in any other game. I had to do the tutorial twice because of this. You have a discord but your discore invite link seems to be not working as i cannot join. CURRENT SCORE: 8/10 (FIRST IMPRESSION WILL UPDATE as i sink TONS of hours into this) I will be giving LOTS OF IDEAS and FEEDBACK as i play this on the discussion/discord area and as i update the review but what is in the game now , the passion of the developers, and the price, just buy it. PS: I NEVER WANTED TO SEE A GAME SUCEED AS MUCH AS I WANT THIS ONE TOO. I love love love PWS but if this game continues progressing the way it is, i think its going to beat my goat of the easy to pick up, as simple or as complex, fun to play wrestling gm game.

Extremely early access but the infrastructure 'is there', buy at your own risk to 'support'. What is currently there is a great UI and very deep database manipulation to create anything from wrestlers to staff to shows, championships, events, broadcasting liscenses, etc. If you are crazy enough you could crate a whole new world with new countries, that is how flexible it is. There are some bugs but updates are frequent, and some parts of the game 'exist' but do not have content yet. I would say in a few months it should be pretty fleshed.

Only a couple hours played, but really loving it so far. It's a little rough in a few places but as someone who spends alot of time in sports management sims like Football Manager and Out of the Park, this scratches the same itch from the wrestling perspective and it's very editable. Need's some work in a few areas but already an enjoyable experience and at a really reasonable price. Well done.