Download 2k17 In 50 Mb

Look, I don't know what I expected. Whenever I talk to fellow pro wrestling fans about the WWE games, they often grimace before offering a handful of excuses. "It's not as bad as last year's" is a favorite refrain, although it rings hollow once you realize that means this year's game is still bad.

Such is the case with World Wrestling Entertainment Two Thousand and Seventeen, A.D. It's an encapsulation of everything people hate about the "reality" era, stapled to a bunch of mediocre gameplay modes. WWE 2K17 doesn't even manage to clear the lowest possible bar -- the fact that it is a video game starring wrestlers you ostensibly like -- with a roster that hides some of its most promising talent behind downloadable content like we're back in the early 2010s.

In fairness, WWE 2K17 is not offensively terrible; it works on a technical level, albeit not as well as you'd hope considering this is the series' third outing on current-gen hardware. It doesn't crash, the frame rate is perfectly fine, but that doesn't mean it's worth your time or your money.

Five seconds into booting WWE 2K17, and you've already discovered the game's biggest problem: there's nothing worth doing. The game has modes, as is customary with sports games these days. You've got "MyCareer," where you bring a rookie up from the Performance Center to the main roster (skipping NXT entirely, for some reason). There, you slog through week after week of WWE programming (with the unskippable TV openings mostly intact), engaging in poorly defined rivalries and slumming around the lower card.

You can actually cut promos in MyCareer, which is a cool idea that would hypothetically allow you to flesh out your custom wrestler. In practice, you jerk off the WWE Universe (read: fans) and complain about the Authority (an evil group that hasn't been a factor since WrestleMania) if you want to be a good guy, and talk about how great you are if you want to be a bad guy. There's no room for nuance; in an era where so many good guys are willing to play PG-rated anti-heroes, it feels misguided to penalize players for actually playing a character rather than screwing with a minigame. Even if you decided to ignore the scoring aspect, the promos are really bad -- they're not "tater tots" embarrassing, they're just rote. There's no personality, no bite. They could be applied to any performer, at any time.

Universe mode is a cross between the MyCareer mode and the "be a GM" modes from other sports games. You are given a year of WWE programming, and you can either simulate it and let the AI play it out, or decide for yourself how WrestleMania 32 will play out. (I had Sami Zayn, my good good ska boy, win the Royal Rumble and go on to capture the title from Triple H.) It's fine, certainly better than MyCareer by virtue of allowing players to skip whole months of programming if they're so inclined. However, without any restrictions imposed on players, it's little more than a sandbox; a toy to occasionally poke at until you're bored. Just like the real Vince McMahon!

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