Excitement is the food for the hungry fans who gather in their thousands to witness the high camp spectacle that is WWF wrestling. Muscle bound heroes and villains make this "sport" a multibillion dollar industry. Now after their first success with WWF Wrestlemania, Acclaim have another potential hit to unleash on the Super Nintendo.

WWF Royal Rumble features all the latest stars in the sport, such as Rick Flair, Crush, and Yokozuna. But some old favourites still remain, like Randy Savage, Mr Perfect and Brett Hart. In all, you have 12 wrestlers to pick from in either the Royal Rumble, a Tag Team encounter, One on One, Triple Tag Team affair, or the main Tournament mode, where you must defeat all your opponents one by one to get the crown that all others shall drool over, the WWF Championship Belt!

In the Royal Rumble event you start with just one other wrestler at first but additional contestants enter the ring at regular intervals until a maximum of six are bashing each other at once. There's no ref, but when a wrestler is chucked out of the

ring he's out for good. The last steroid abuser left is the ultimate winner. This event can take a while, and it's the best of all of them.

The Tag Team events are much like the one on one matches but you can combine with your part¬ner to pull off some extra-dirty tricks. Once the wrestlers leave the ring a 10 second limit is called out by the ref but no restrictions are in effect! So the chairs get some air!

There's a whole heap of basic moves punches, kicks, head-butts, piledrivers, atomic drops, running dropkicks, clotheslines, stomps, splashes, and dirty tricks like eye gouges and choke holds. Each character also has a trademark manoeuvre, like Crush's "Cranium Crunch" and The Undertakers "Tombstone Piledriver"! The moves are easy to pull off and very effective.

The first thing you'll notice about the graphics is the excep¬tional quality of the digitised stills of all the wrestlers. However, the in-game sprites are

not animated as smoothly as I had hoped for. The sound on the other hand, has some great moments. The slapping fists sound good and the smashing chair really rattles the speakers! And each wrestler has his own trademark piece of victory music which sounds fairly cool.

The excitement's here, the fun is here, and the challenge is here too (there's 10 difficulty levels to please even the most seasoned player) but the game's biggest plus is the humungous playability level that keeps you wanting to suplex your way through that one more time!

For wrestling fans, this is THE game to get for Christmas. The Royal Rumble event has that much happening at once that just watching it is sometimes enough! WWF Royal Rumble had me hooked for quite some time and should do the same for you.

Brian Costelloe

As printed in Hyper magazine #1