From there things start to look a lot more promising. The menu is very easy to navigate through and the options are pretty generous and it’s when looking through these you see a major advantage over the WWE becoming apparent. With Impact, the actual wrestlers have more input into the game than they’ve EVER had in Smackdown. Even the tutorials have their commentary, complete with excessive cheese, but it’s not just there it’s noticeable. Once you get into the game proper you really start to see the extra effort put in with regards to moves and their execution, which actually give you a sense of two people brawling away, unlike the fake-beyond-fake feel that Smackdown sometimes left you with.

The initial roster sees you with 17 TNA superstars, but through unlockables you can bump this up to 31, which for a smaller federation is still a decent number to play with (and let’s be honest, it doesn’t stop Midway from releasing new ones as a download in the future). There are a fair few match variations too, not quite as many as SvR, but enough to keep you entertained, the Ultimate X mode being particularly good fun.

The graphics on offer here are very well done and we’d expect nothing less from the Mortal Kombat men, with detailed likenesses on offer and very good motion capture work done for the guys who did their own moves and the others who got a stunt double to do them. The crowd aren’t too bad either and help the atmosphere by moving around in a better manner than some of the cardboard cut-out audiences I’ve seen in the past.