KONAMI Wrestlers get down and dirty in the "Mad Mud Match" in Rumble Roses.

Rumble Roses is great
eye candy and little else

For those PlayStation 2 owners who have longed for a game filled with eye candy in the vein of the Xbox-exclusive Dead or Alive Beach Volleyball, take heart: The answer to your shallow prayers has finally arrived, and it's called Rumble Roses.

Rumble Roses Rating: Mature Publisher: Konami Platform: PlayStation 2

The premise is that a whole bunch of women are entering a wrestling tournament to achieve individual goals, but that really won't matter to gamers when all they're paying attention to are the character designs. These ladies are well rendered, probably the best-looking renderings this side of the Dead or Alive cast.

Ten fighters are available at the outset, fulfilling a wide range of male fantasies from the prim and proper teacher to the naughty nurse and pretty much everything in between. Unlockable along the way are alternate "good girl/bad girl" variations of each character.

But it's in actually playing the game that the old clichˇ about beauty only being skin deep starts ringing true.

Granted, the fighting's solid, as it should be -- the fighting engine comes courtesy of Yuke's, the studio responsible for most of THQ's World Wrestling Entertainment games. Yet, the depth in Rumble Roses pales in comparison with Yuke's WWE Smackdown vs. Raw, which was released around the same time.

The lack of depth extends to the available game options. Gamers can fight a one-on-one exhibition match, play through a story mode or -- in this game's lone innovation -- participate in a one-on-one "Mad Mud Match." Splashing around in the mud hardly seems like a fair trade-off for the loss of tag-team matches, cage matches and other gimmick matches that come standard with other games on the market.

As for that story mode, Konami took the bizarre step of not letting players save between matches, forcing them to play through a wrestler's entire story in one sitting. The process takes about half an hour per wrestler, which would have been fine if the stories were at least compelling to sit through.

But plots range from the clichˇd (one wrestler is trying to uphold the honor of her late mother) to the contrived (a teacher searches for her student but just so happens to get tied up in a whole bunch of matches in the process).

Add in subpar voice acting in which phrases like "Release her this instant" are said with all the emotional impact of someone saying, "I'll have a salad and a diet soda," and what results is a game that's worth a rental but little else.