General Impression of PC DLC?

I'm a pretty big fan of fighting road, and all the new parts and moves. The DLC is great.

I really like the edits, I'm no Fire Pro expert but I am a big New Japan fan and I consider the edits to be pretty damn good!

I am still very early(I think) in Fighting Road but I'm enjoying it a lot!

My only complaint is the DRM. I think that is total bullshit that SC sneaked that in without even announcing it or putting a notification on the store page.

I also disapprove of the DRM, but the game itself is still great and I'm getting a lot of mileage out of the editing options.

I do miss some mods like entrances, health meters, and rumbles, but I'm making due. I also still don't like the match options defaulting to 1P every single time I make a match.

I've had one minor issue where my X button (PS4) stopped working mid-game and I had to reset it. Scrolling was off too. Probably a controller connection issue if anything, but I'll see if it happens again.

A reviewer might call this "a mixed bag."

I haven't touched it yet but I've looked into Fighting Road and it seems like a dumb, fun, kitschy-ass visual novel thing. Definitely not a deep story mode at all but it's just dumb vaguely homoerotic fun that seems like a naff, wanky way to waste some time.

There's A LOT to like about this: the edit parts are fantastic. I kind of wish we got a few more basic edit parts that aren't wrestler-specific, but there's a lot of great stuff, and everyone's edit pieces do a lot to even just bring some much needed depth/shading to trunks/tights when you use the same shades with different highlighting/similar shades of the base colour. I really love that. I absolutely adore all of the new pants/calf/leg parts. I think there's a disconnect between new/old faces and new/old hairstyles that makes it very hard to use those pieces. Isolated I think those parts look fantastic but you put them up against old faces/hairstyles and there's an art style clash that makes it hard to use those new parts (for fictional edits).

LOVE LOVE LOVE the voice samples—even just having five voice samples opens things up a lot. They are very particular and again make it hard for fictional edits, especially if an edit had a "voice" to begin with and you're editing them, but there's still some fun stuff in there that really does a lot to bring more character to the edits. I know it's NJPW DLC specifically but I really would have liked them to take some of those NJPW-specific lines and brought them to the generic voices. I also really wish they would have updated the female voices. I like a lot of what they did and undoubtedly they added so much to the game with voices and faces but in a way the new stuff very much sticks out in a way that makes me wish they had done more to update some of the old voices.

A lot of the new moves are awesome and very useful. Love the Endless German for example. Love the new catch-as-catch-can style headlock for example. Still wish they were a bit more free with move classification like the Bushi Roll being available in small or at least medium. I also really wish there were some more basic moves. They've got a lot in the game and I am very happy that over the course of the game's release schedule they've added a lot of basic moves that I honestly thought they'd never add but there's still some very basic omissions. I am definitely spoiled by mods but there's some VERY SIMPLE stuff (can't think of off the top of my head at the moment, tbh) that I still think need to be added. I also feel like though you can pull off stuff like snapmares into dropkicks/soccer kicks with priorities stuff like that I'd love to just have in one move instead of having to use priorities. We're also spoiled by B moves and I lovelovelovelovelove the Appeal Elbow Drop B but I'd love even more B moves. I'd love a few moves that are currently grapples but could be strikes like the Stunner being a strike. Also: give me at least 15 prios. We need them. 20 would be amazing. I don't ever expect stuff to change where you could prio into grapples or something but just some more prios would be rad.

And, yeah, the DRM stuff is just absolute bullshit. Spike's business practices have really soured me a lot on this game. It's a pretty big pissoff. Not to the point that I'm "boycotting" the game but it's very off-putting. I'm generally online a lot and it'd be a lot more ridiculous if say this got ported to Switch, but even just thinking logistically, I'm taking a trip home next week and Fire Pro is a great way to spend some time as my mom has shit wifi and I planned to just spend some free time at night fucking around in Fire Pro. Can't really do that with the always-online component. I can still do a lot, obviously, but it would be very nice to access the DLC. I get it, but like... even just have some kind of option where you can access the DLC but just can't upload to the Workshop or you have a limited window of time to be able to access online or some shit—have some kind of check for, say, every five hours of game time or something to check against. It's a small problem for me because the amount of times I'll be offline whilst playing Fire Pro is limited but it's still something that just fundamentally doesn't make much sense to me and does nothing but piss off a VERY SMALL and niche audience—especially considering they never messaged this to the audience before the DLC came out.

"A mixed bag" is harsh. I really do like it but I think I'm still slightly more harsh of it than others. It's great, but I still want more, especially for the money. $20 isn't huge but you start to add that up with the base game price or the other DLC and it really starts to add up. I think the game is a straight-up ripoff on PS4, and honestly, even PC—though to a lesser degree because the console version still feels pretty busted comparatively speaking.

Speaking of being completely busted: The UI is pretty alright on PC. Not a huge improvement, really. It definitely looks better, but there's still very much some usability stuff that I think is pretty fucking inexcusable. Stuff like not being able to mass delete/move edits. Stuff like not being able to alphabetize edits. Moves not being alphabetized, or not having the ability to reorder them is ridiculous. Just random little hitches. That shit is fucking stupid. It's 2018 and this game is now out of Early Access. It's pretty fucking ridiculous that the UI and usability isn't better.

It's even more of a problem on PS4. All the usability issues are compounded by hitching and freezing that are demonstrably worse on PS4—honestly to the point that the PS4 editing is basically unusable to me. Granted it MAY have got better in the few weeks since I bothered but that first impression was so bad I was very turned off of the idea from playing around in the edit mode for a prolonged period of time.

All of that said: I love it, but it isn't worth $70 CDN on PS4 at all and like $50 on PC after the DLC—and more than that once the rest of the DLC comes out. The edit parts and moves themselves are awesome and really add a lot to creating depth to textures and adds a lot of new options both in terms of new possibilities for the "aesthetic" of edits and just adding a lot more versatility to how edits wrestle and present their characters—with both moves and voice samples (and even just appearance). I love all that stuff. I do miss mods but I still think vanilla is rad and this is a definite improvement.

I still do think the lack of improvement in the UI/usability is absolutely fucking infuriating/inexcusable, though. I know we all expected not that big of a change/overhaul and it's not game-breaking but when you've played this game for over 700 hours this kind of stuff starts to add up and makes it all the more frustrating when I WANT to spend a lot of time with this new update but shit like organizing edits by alphabetical order or spending twice as much time deleting edits as I should have to is really, really annoying and that shit starts to really add up over time. I don't think people are critical enough of that shit anymore—again, I know we all expected it at this point and they're a small team and limited resources and whatever but it's god-damned 2018 and half of the game is menus. Your menus need to be better. And on PS4 specifically they need to be WAY more responsive.

Defaults: Pretty bad for the most part. It's subjective of course but there's plenty of "wait, why" decisions and there's an overall absence of psychology (i.e., guys picking up after brainbusters.) My favorites among the defaults are ZSJ (who wrestles like a Fire Pro submission edit IRL anyway) and Yano. Moveset wise they're accurate as far as I can tell though it's annoying they haven't been updated with the new moves added with the Day One Patch. Visually, they're mostly great.

New parts/moves: Worth the price of admission alone. It adds more moves and parts than any single entry in the Fire Pro series has in a long time. However, some of the new moves are fairly janky, looking more like mod moves than moves made by professionals. Hell, the Cravate is absolutely more janky than most of the good mod moves. Still, they're mostly good. The heads are very good but are too distinct to use for anyone else besides who they're modeled after.

Fighting Road: I dunno. I barely played it. I was hyped for it pre-release but have absolutely no desire to play it now. The sheer number of typos in the script is amusing to me, though.

DRM: Isn't something I have to worry about personally thus I don't think about it. It's annoying though.

The new defaults: I don't think they're completely terrible but maybe i just have a poor eye for things. will agree that ZSJ and Yano are pretty good. Kinda sad they haven't updated the defaults to fix any bugs and add their new moves accordingly.

Fighting Road: I still haven't really played it, but I love how cheesy it is.

The new moves: Good! Some of them are especially well animated, like Golden Trigger and Orienteering with Napalm Death.

The new parts: also good! They put a lot of effort into making sure their attires look as close to the real deal as possible.

The new UI: ... not much better than the old one, but I appreciate the small improvements. I was hoping for more than just a new skin and a couple of new shortcut functions (like instant min-max or stepping up by 10s), but otoh, they lowered expectations about that.

The DRM: Shitty, but at least for me, not a deal breaker.