WWE 2K25 Bloodline Edition

Week 19 of a 25-week SmackDown season, I had a title feud sitting at maximum heat, a stadium booked, and exactly enough budget left to pay for either the venue or the two headliners I needed inside it. I took the headliners, ran the show in a smaller building, and still lost the week to Raw because my mid-card had been grinding out the same match type for a month and the crowd had quietly stopped caring. That is MyGM, and it is the reason a strategy player should be reading a wrestling review at all. Strip away the licence and MyGM is a compact, legible franchise sim. You draft a roster against a hard salary cap, which turns every signing into an opportunity cost: one main-event contract is three reliable mid-carders who can carry a Tuesday show. Then you book week by week against a rival GM, balancing star popularity, stamina and injury risk, match-type variety (repeat the same stipulation too often and ratings sag), rivalry heat that has to be built and then cashed in at the right moment, and power cards that let you poach talent or sabotage the other brand. Seasons scale from short 25-week runs to long 100-week campaigns, and you can play brand-versus-brand with up to four GMs, locally or online, which is where the mode genuinely comes alive. The decision space is narrower than a Paradox campaign, but the feedback loop is tight and the failure states are readable. When you lose a week, you almost always know why. The rest of the package is the usual annual spread, ranging from good to filler. The in-ring game is competent and slightly more deliberate this year thanks to the chain wrestling exchange that opens matches, plus new stipulations including the Bloodline Rules match the edition is named after. Showcase is straight fan service built around the Anoa'i dynasty, narrated by Paul Heyman, and it works if you already care about that history and does nothing for you if you don't. MyRise gives you two scripted career paths. Universe mode remains the sandbox where you write your own promotion week to week. The creation suite is still absurdly deep, and the community uploads are the real content pipeline: within days people have built rosters, arenas and belts the licence would never allow. What disappoints is predictable and worth naming. MyFaction is a card-collecting live-service layer with real-money purchases bolted onto a full-price release, and while you can ignore it entirely, its presence bleeds into how the game presents progression everywhere else. The AI is the weak link across modes: your rival GM books competently but rarely surprises you, and by season two you can read its patterns and beat it on autopilot. There is almost no tutorial worth the name for MyGM's economy, so your first campaign is effectively the tutorial and you should treat it as disposable. Menu load times and general presentation friction on PC are a recurring complaint, and the 69 percent positive rating across roughly 6,600 Steam reviews reflects a crowd that likes the game underneath and resents the packaging around it. Here is the case for a newcomer anyway. If you have never touched a wrestling sim and you like management games, start a 25-week MyGM season on a middle difficulty, draft for depth rather than star power, simulate the matches you don't want to play, and treat the in-ring portion as optional. Approached that way this is a 20-hour management game with a good replay loop and a couch-multiplayer mode you can teach a non-gamer in ten minutes, and the wrestling knowledge you supposedly need turns out to be about four minutes of learning which names draw. Approached the other way, as a fighting game you also manage, it will feel thin fast. Buy it for the booking. Ignore the card shop, and set expectations for the AI accordingly.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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