I'm giving this a "not recommended" but let me be clear, it has NOTHING to do with the gameplay, optimisation or graphics.

Because honestly? The game feels INCREDIBLE. The new additions are ridiculous in the best way possible. You can literally slam your opponents onto thumbtacks in a ring surrounded by fire. It's genuinely fun.

But the monetisation completely kills it.

You're paying full Triple A price, around $80, and still being treated like you're playing a free-to-play game. Half the roster is locked. Arenas are locked. Core features are locked. And on top of that, there's a full Battle Pass system layered over everything.

This should be one of the best WWE games ever made, and in many ways, it is. But 2K just can't get out of their own way. The greed is so aggressive that it actively drags the entire experience down.

So I finally decided to write a honest review for this game. I was waiting for them to fix things, which they did, for the most part, and even though I really wanted to recommend this game, because I really enjoy it and love it, I can’t recommend it, for a simple reason I will detail below. And it hurts me, because it's only one thing that prevents it from being IMO one of the greatest ever and me from recommending it.

They main problem with this game is its predatory approach for the consumer. It is already expensive enough, with the most expensive version being about 150 eur. And don’t get me wrong, the game has PLENTY of content, even with the basic edition at about 60 eur. If you are a casual player, this version is more than enough for you, there is definitely no need to pay for the other versions if you don’t want to.
But with that being said, now for the negative aspect. They are really trying to make you spend money in microtransactions. Due to the massive amount of bad reviews, they had no choice to back down a little bit and improve the new ringside pass feature, which was the main reason for the bad reviews (Basically they locked a lot of content, even DLCs that people paid for, behind a battle pass system, which you had to pay more if you wanted to unlock instantly). Like I said, they massively improved this, so it’s not a big deal anymore.
But aside from that, there are 2 modes that rely heavily in microtransactions. First the Island, which has mostly cosmetics that you need to purchase in the mode to unlock (I am ok with this mode though).
But then, and now the main reason for me giving the game a bad review, there is MyFaction. This mode locks a lot of personas (which basically are alternate skins for wrestlers) behind ridiculous conditions. It was bad enough last year, but this time they doubled down on the difficulty to get them without spending money. They heavily nerfed the ways to gain points to unlock them for free, they heavily increased the requirements to unlock them, and massively increased the price for the cards overall (out of which you need A LOT to unlock some of these persona cards). The difficulty of the challenges is also heavily increased (although this is not a problem for me, since I like the challenges, but I can’t imagine a new player achieving most of these). And the worst part is that they keep making things difficult for players that don’t want and will not spend more money in an already full priced game, in a desperate attempt to make them empty their wallets (and the prices for Virtual Currency are also ridiculous, on top of everything). Doing the math, if you want to unlock one of these persona cards by paying money, you are expected to pay about 70 eur for a single persona, which is totally ridiculous. (Not to mention that most of these personas were already in previous games, with some people paying for them, and of course, they don’t carry over to this game). This mode has always had a bad reputation for the monetization aspect, but this year is on another level. And for this reason, I can’t give a good review for the game, even though I love almost all the other aspects of the other modes, they improved the gameplay a lot, the new match types are fun, the visuals improved over past entries… And yes, like every other game nowadays, there are the occasional bugs, but nothing game-breaking so far in my experience.

The way I see it, it’s a great game, but just the constant difficulties that they keep adding to unlocking stuff in MyFaction, trying to force us to spend more money, I see it as a TOTAL DISRESPECT and a slap in the face to the consumers, especially to those of us that wanted to support it and bought the Monday Night Wars edition, and make me really not want to recommend this game to anyone. I just don’t want to support anymore a greedy company that only cares about money in a so blatant way, even if the rest of aspects of the game are mostly positive in my opinion. If they finally come to their senses and make things easier for those of us that won’t spend more money, I will gladly change this review to “recommended” and will be in the mood to purchase next year’s game, which, as of how disappointed I am today because of their greed, I am definitely not buying.

Don't buy it even if it's on sale.

I've had problems with the last few WWE games, but at least you cold actually play them. This one just crashes whenever you try to play a match.