TNA for the iPhone, as you might expect, can be a painfully awful game for people who are not fans of wrestling. In other words, 99% of the population. What might surprise you, however, is how deep the game really is, and, dare I say it, how much fun you can have with the game. Some people, including myself at times, will find the game an abomination for mixing certain gameplay elements together, but, to the developer’s credit, Longtail Studios has made the deepest wrestling I’ve ever seen – on the iPhone no less. Now I just have to figure out if that’s a good or a bad thing for the genre...

Taking a different approach to wrestling, Longtail Studios has drastically changed the format of typical wrestling games. Mixing the concept of wrestling with Final Fantasy, the world, at least to my knowledge, has received its first turn-based wrestling game. I know what you are thinking, “God help us,” but stay with me – it’s not as bad as it sounds. The game lets you choose certain basic moves, which, in turn, can lead to special moves or combos, and the game even features a short defensive phase to help negate and even reverse some of the damage coming at you. This is where the game can get a bit tricky though. By all means, the turn-based system of TNA works and is surprisingly deep, but I can’t help think that it would have been better off with a more standard wrestling formula. There’s something about the turn-based formula that’s just not very satisfying when coupled with a wrestling game. I appreciate what they were trying to do with the gameplay, but their efforts may have been better off spent fixing some of the flaws with the game, such as the game’s awful button registry system.