10 Video Games With Totally Unique Combat

4. Fire Pro Wrestling World

Way, WAY more people need to check out the Fire Pro series, and not just wrestling fans. While its simplistic aesthetic tends to drive the masses towards 2K's WWE games instead, Fire Pro has a far greater amount of customisation options for diehards, and a unique set of mechanics that blends the best parts of arcade sports games with the show-stopping nature of wrestling's biggest bouts.

Now, it is obfuscating as hell, and there are legions of expanded tutorial videos filling in for where Spike Chunsoft essentially drop the ball, but once you get your head around timing-based grapples and the various ways to go in and out of your superstar's animations, you'll be hooked.

Built around giving you access to a real-life wrestler's entire repertoire of moves on the fly, there are four main attack prompts - light, medium and two heavies - that once you're in a grapple, become four separate sets of D-pad based moves to pull off. One of many great features here is that you can't just bust out your most damage-dealing moves straight away either, they have to be worked towards and earned, like the flow of a real-life match.

Even breathing has a dedicated button, bringing in one of many background calculations surrounding how you'll perform when accessing high-flying moves or bigger slams.

All in all, Fire Pro simply doesn't get the love and exposure it deserves in the West, and while that's largely down to how tough it can be to figure out, the reward on the other end is like nothing else.