SLAMMED!

Read the full review on the [url=https://forum.choiceofgames.com/t/allusives-reviews-next-review-up-community-college-hero-knowledge-is-power/178235/62?u=allusive]Choice of Games forums.[/url] Slammed! is a Choicescript game all about wrestling. You go through a career starting from a collegiate wrestler all the way to the heights of nationwide super stardom. That’s if you can handle the physical, mental, and emotional demands of the industry. Slammed! was a pleasant surprise for me. I’d heard good things about it in passing, but I’ve never been a fan of wrestling. Not really. I had Slammed! on the back-burner of my Choicescript game catalogue for a long time because I just wasn’t enthused about playing an interactive wrestling novel. Which means it really says something that half-way through I was punching the air in excitement and shadow-boxing as I read and imagined the matches playing out in my mind’s eye. PROS: Love of the sport. Chikiamco clearly loves wrestling and it shows. More than that, they have done an incredible job of making that love infectious and spreading it to the reader. I’m no expert, but it all seemed incredibly authentic to what a rising wrestler would go through and the nature of the business. Time skips done right. Slammed! covers a period of several year’s in your character’s life and career, and it would be easy for this to feel poorly paced or fragmented, but the author knows what the through-line and theme of the story is and keeps it as the connective tissue bridging all the scenes and jumps in time. The story feels like a well-written bio-pic of your wrestler, smartly knowing what the reader needs to experience, see, and learn in each part of the career before neatly jumping to the next milestone. Strong, simple stats. There are only six stats in Slammed! and each is tightly controlled and used. You have three stats covering your wrestling moves - whether you are strong, have great technique, and your ability to trash talk. The last three include your relationship with the fans (how much of a Face or Heel you are according to the favor or heat you get from an audience), and whether you are courteous to your fellow wrestlers or only interested in making yourself look good. The final of these three is ‘Kayfabe’. Maybe one of the more unique stats in Choicescript history, since it measure how much you lean into the theater of professional wrestling’s storylines at all times or if you drop the illusion outside the ring. It’s actually a fun mechanic, letting you perform actions or say things you really don’t feel or believe as a character, all in service of a storyline or the public image of your wrestling persona. I started as a heel in the independent circuit and the game immediately tested my commitment by having a little girl ask for my autograph and giving me the option to be mean to her. (I couldn’t do it, and my fellow wrestlers laughed at me, which I thought was great.) Exciting action in text form. I wasn’t sure how well wrestling would translate to a purely text medium, but Chikiamco makes it look easy. There were three or four times I had to go to the internet to look up a wrestling move based on the name given, but besides that, the action was clear, exciting, and dramatically paced. There’s lots of interesting choices in the matches as well. Do you go along with the script? Do you play to the crowd? Sell the other wrestler’s moves? Turn it into a real fight? How do you best utilize your own wrestler’s unique strengths and weaknesses? Meaningful gender differentiation. You can be a man or a woman in Slammed! and rather than being purely cosmetic, it meaningfully changes wrestling leagues, character opinions, reactions, and even whether or not what your character is doing is an attempt to break a glass ceiling. Nice subtle story that builds. What starts as seemingly a sort of career biography story of a wrestling career slowly transforms into a coherent story, piece by piece, until you have a strong character and personal goal in addition to the desire to reach the top of the wrestling stardom. CONS: Assumed reader knowledge of wrestling. This is a minor thing, in my humble opinion, but Slammed! assumes some prior level of familiarity with wrestling. Chikiamco does take pains to explain things like kayfabe, faces and heels, but other terms you have to either work out yourself from context clues (which is possible in many cases), or taking a moment to look up the info online. This most often came up in the terms for wrestling moves. Do you “counter with a DDT” or “go for a leap frog before counter attacking”? Other times wrestling moves were clearly explained after a term is used. Still, I guess it isn’t unusual for Chikiamco to assume someone buying a quarter-million word interactive novel on wrestling wouldn’t be a complete layman on the subject. Final verdict: I would definitely recommend Slammed! to anyone that enjoys interactive fiction, not just wrestling fans. For wrestling fans it will just be extra enjoyable. I didn’t go into it thinking I’d be so impressed, but here I am!