Scopely is a company that may be familiar to those who have played Dice with Buddies, Star Trek Fleet Command or The Walking Dead: Road to Survival. But pro wrestling fans also know them for the WWE Champions series, and it happens to be back for the new year with a new version. Much like in the original, you can collect hundreds of WWE Superstars as you go along, but this time, WWE’s women’s division is now more than adequately represented.
Whether you’re talking about present-day stars like Roman Reigns, AJ Styles, and Alexa Bliss or legends like Hulk Hogan and Andre the Giant, they’re all available in this game, which also features an immersive career mode (among other modes), tons of special moves to unlock, and the same old Match 3 moves combined with “Action RPG gameplay” that makes it much more than just your average casual title.
If you’ve played the original version of WWE Champions, the learning curve shouldn’t be too steep, and even if you haven’t, the Match 3 mechanics are very easy to get out of the way. What may be overwhelming, however, is the tons of features included in the game, may it be features you’re familiar with from the original title or new ones that were introduced in subsequent updates, as well as the current version.
So with that out of the way, let us take a look at our first WWE Champions 2020 strategy guide, where we shall go through some tips you may need to keep in mind as a first-time player. Winning may look easy, but it’s far from the only thing you’ll need to figure out in this game!
1. The Basics Of WWE Champions 2020
As anyone who played the original WWE Champions should know, this is a wrestling game with Match 3 mechanics, or a Match 3 game with wrestling mechanics. However you see it, the basic concepts remain in place in this year’s version, and veteran or returning players should see that right away in the tutorial stage.
Just like it always has been, matching a combination of three or more of the same color gem on the board will result in your wrestler performing a move and hitting your opponent. Matching four of a kind results in a row or column line break and substantially more damage against your opponent, while matching five of a kind results in the gem where you started the match getting converted into a Wild Card gem, meaning it can be matched with gems of any color. That, too, results in more damage than an ordinary three-of-a-kind match, as does stringing together a combo where one match leads into at least another as new gems drop down.
Win a match and you will get a substantial prize for clearing the stage/level for the first time — these may include a bunch of coins or tokens, Talent Points (TP) posters, or in some cases, new posters that may allow you to unlock new wrestlers or improve existing ones. We shall get to all that later on in this guide, but while we’re still taking basics, take note that you can earn up to one to three stars per match, depending on how much Health you have remaining when it’s over.
Apart from the colored gems, there are white WWE boxes that only result in one point of damage each when matched, but the obvious trade-off here, is getting more bonus prizes apart from your first-win reward, if applicable. Matching three boxes results in one bonus prize, matching six results in two, and matching 13 or more allows you to get all of the three bonus prizes, which generally include coins (much fewer than the first-time prize), TP Posters, or tokens (one per box, instead of five or more of one kind as a first-time prize).
Depending on how much Health you have at the end of a match, you can get anywhere from ten bonus boxes to none at all — these will then be distributed randomly, thus giving you a chance of making more matches with the boxes that remain on the board after you win. (Losing, of course, means you don’t get any bonus prizes, or any rewards at all, for that matter.)
When it comes to kicking out after you’ve been pinned by your opponent, you will also have to match at least three gems of the same color — as your Health decreases, the value of each match goes down, thus making it much harder for you to kick out once you’ve substantially been weakened by your opponent. You can pin your opponent (or they can pin you) once the Health bar goes down to Danger — if it’s already at Danger and you (or your opponent) make a match, that results in an automatic finisher or roll-up, leading to a pin and the win.
Just as it is in the original version, each wrestler can have up to three active special moves equipped at the same time — these include two regular specials and one finishing move, and you’ll need to match three of a specific color in order to charge up these moves. For example, The Rock’s default finisher is the People’s Elbow, which requires 12 yellow gems matched in order to be fully charged/utilized, while his two other specials are the Rock Bottom (9 blue gems) and the Samoan Drop (8 black gems). You can unlock more available moves as you keep improving your wrestlers, although the same limitation applies — you can have no more than three active moves at any given point.
Related: WWE Champions 2020 Tier List: A Complete Guide to the Best Characters in Each Class
Much like in the original title, your “stock” wrestler, or the character you start out with, will be The Rock, and as you complete the later parts of the tutorial, you’re going to unlock another two big names in the world of professional wrestling — John Cena and Roman Reigns. We’re going to get it out of the way as early as now — these are likely going to be the only male wrestlers in your roster unless you’re willing to pay real money or premium currency, but even with that limitation in mind, these three should be enough to tide you over as you go through the early stages of the game and complete the first few leagues and Career Mode tours.
As for female wrestlers, it appears that Stephanie McMahon — who is far better known as an authority figure — will be the only woman in your roster for quite some time once you reach League 3 and unlock the Women’s Evolution tours.
2. Improving Your Wrestlers – Leveling Up, Evolution, And Fusion
Although the first few matches in the first available tour (NXT Tour — Atlanta) should be pretty easy — the Tutorial stage deliberately takes care of that for you — you’ll find out eventually that getting three stars in the other matches isn’t quite as simple. That’s where the Roster tab comes in handy, as this will be your one-stop shop for improving your wrestlers in a variety of ways, starting from the basic process of leveling them up.
Clicking on the Roster tab will take you straight to your roster, which will show you all the WWE Superstars you currently have unlocked, as well as a list of “Superstars in Loot” — just as we hinted earlier, you shouldn’t expect to get any of them for free until you’ve made your way up the leagues quite a bit. From here, you can tap on any unlocked Superstar and first, improve their rating by tapping on the Level Up tab, then on the Level Up button on the lower right of the screen. Here, you can choose to increase their level by increments of one, or by the maximum number of levels your coins can afford — or the maximum number of levels based on their star rating.
Once you’ve maxed out a wrestler’s level based on their star rating, the next step would be to Evolve them, which increases their star rating but not their rarity (Bronze, Silver, or Gold). This would require a few thousand coins, as well as all of the specific Tokens required for the evolution to push forward. Simply tap on a token to find out which levels in Career Mode you need to play for a chance to get them, then hit the Go button if you want to head straight to that level. Additionally, you’ll also need to make sure all equipped moves are maxed out.
The final means in which you can improve your wrestlers through the Roster menu is by fusing them with a higher-rarity duplicate poster — for example, fusing one of your Bronze Superstars with the same Superstar’s Silver poster would increase their rarity from Bronze to Silver. This would again require coins, but in addition to that, you’ll also need to have the required number of Shards, which are mainly earned whenever you get a duplicate poster of a wrestler you’ve already unlocked. But this isn’t the only use for Shards, as we’ll explain in the very next tip.
3. Make Sure To Upgrade Your Moves As Well
Aside from leveling up, evolving, and fusing your Superstars, you’ll also need to make sure that their moves are also upgraded whenever possible. After you’ve tapped on any given Superstar that’s already on your roster, you can tap on Moves on the bottom center part of the screen and view each of the moves you’ve unlocked, or currently have equipped.
Here, you’ll be able to view their current damage, the additional perks that come with the move (e.g. being able to choose which gems to change to a specific color), and the number of/color of the gems you need to match in order to fully load up that move and unleash it on an opponent. Although this information can be viewed during any given match, it’s always a good practice to review the moves in each Superstar’s Moves sub-menu so you can familiarize yourself with how they work in the context of WWE Champions 2020.
When leveling up a move, you’ll need to have enough TP posters — at first, you’ll only need two in order to upgrade a move from level 1 to 2, though this will progressively increase as you keep leveling up the move. However, if you wish to save up your TP posters for another time when you may really need them (e.g. when you’ve sufficiently leveled up a move), you also have the option to use that wrestler’s Shards, in the event you’ve gotten them through duplicates of the same Superstar poster. Increasing a move’s level does not reduce the number of gems required to fully charge it, but rather increases the amount of damage it can do.
Aside from increasing the damage, another reason to level up your moves, as we mentioned earlier, is the fact that the game will require ALL equipped moves to be maxed out before you can evolve a wrestler. Additionally, this is typically among the many missions you may need to complete in order to advance from one league to the next — or to earn more Manager Points and collect more Loot Coins — in the Manager’s League menu.
4. Complete Your Daily And League Missions
One of the revamped features in WWE Champions 2020 is the all-new league system. While this may suggest a mode in which you compete against other real-life managers, a better way to describe this feature is by calling it the new system that allows you to gradually unlock new modes and features, as well as unlock more Superstar posters that could help you beef up your roster and recruit more talent.
For example, moving up from League 3 to League 4 allows you to unlock Entourage, Daily Showdown, The Road: European Tour, and Hard Mode for both Sunday Night Heat and Deadman’s Daily, and also gets you a two-star Bronze poster for Bray Wyatt (his old Eater of Worlds gimmick) and 25,000 coins.
So how do you League up anyway? Tap on the League button on the upper center part of the main menu, and you’ll automatically be taken to your League Missions — complete all of them and you will be able to move up to the next league. Once again, the Go button takes you straight to the modes, tours, or menus where you can complete the task at hand, and completing each of these missions could earn you some nice rewards once you’re done.
For instance, the League 3 missions could earn you a 50,000 coin reward by getting your first two-star Silver Superstar, and six Historic Tokens for your two-star Superstars by defeating the League of Nations in WWE Live Tour — St Louis. These missions do not expire, thus allowing you to League Up at your own pace.
The Daily Missions tab, quite obviously, includes missions that you need to complete within the same day — these, by the way, reset everyday at 8 p.m. Eastern time. Each Daily Mission is worth 10 or 20 Daily Mission points, and these may include tasks such as winning one match in a certain mode, claiming your Free Bag (available twice a day, typically contains TP Posters), and more.
For each increment of 10 until you reach a total of 50 Daily Mission Points for the day, you will get to open a bag with various rewards, including, but not limited to Manager’s Reward Points. Collect enough of these and you will be rewarded with Loot Coins for your current league — these can be used to get new Superstar posters in the Loot menu, though the wrestlers you will receive will always depend on which league you’re currently in.
5. Know The Classes And Styles Of Each Wrestler
Oftentimes, if you use a much higher-rated Superstar against a lowly-rated opponent, a wrestler’s class and style wouldn’t matter much. But when you’re talking about matches where you’re fairly even in terms of your rating, your choice of wrestler will become far more important — are you going with someone who’s strong against your opponent’s class, or did you end up choosing someone who’s naturally weak based on their class and style?
In the original version of WWE Champions, wrestlers only had one of six different Classes, and that remains true in the 2020 version. The elemental system, if you could call it that, remains the same as well — Showboat (yellow) is strong against Striker (black), which is strong against Trickster (purple), which is strong against Technician (green), which is strong against Powerhouse (red), which is strong against Acrobat (blue).
Showboats are, as described by the game, low-to-medium damage Superstars that tend to rally late in the match after taking a lot of damage early on. Strikers deal out low gem damage and medium cost moves but are particularly explosive when stringing together combos.
Tricksters deal out medium damage with an average move cost and stand out for their ability to “manipulate” the board and deal out random chaos. Technicians deal out medium damage and excel mostly in submission maneuvers but have an above average move cost.
Powerhouses normally deal out the most gem damage but their moves, especially their finishers, take the longest to charge up Lastly, Acrobats are your high-flying types, and while it doesn’t take long for them to charge up their moves, their gem damage is usually quite low.
As for the individual styles, these include Aggressive, Defensive, Focused, and Chaotic, and the game describes each of them right below an overview of a wrestler’s Class, with tips on how to make the most out of that style and how to work against opponents when using that style. We won’t go into much detail here, but for example, if you’re using a Chaotic Acrobat, you’ll want to steal as many of your opponent’s gems as you could, and steal a Focused Showboat’s gems if applicable. Meanwhile, an Aggressive wrestler will be advised to generate and break Silence and Botch gems — again, if the situation warrants it.
6. Stock Up On, And Conserve On Your Health Packs
Although all Superstars automatically heal up completely and go back to full health within 24 hours, the fact that you have to wait one day before using your go-to Superstar can be a bit of a downer. But it’s something you may have to do in order to save up on Health Packs.
Especially once you’ve got a larger roster to manage and are using at least one primary wrestler per class, you may find yourself having to ration those Health Packs, and that’s something you don’t want happening due to how valuable they are — they do, after all, restore up to 10,000 Health Points to each wrestler per usage!
First and foremost, you shouldn’t use a Health Pack on any wrestler who has just a couple thousand HP or fewer to recover before returning to full health. This is a very easy trap to fall into, especially for first-day players starting out with a ton of Health Packs, but as we’ll be elaborating on later, getting fewer than three stars in any given level or mode is not the end of the world, as long as you win the match. Unless their Health is especially low, keep on using that wrestler as long as they have a realistic chance of hanging on to defeat their opponent.
Normally, Health Packs regenerate once per 45 minutes until you’ve got a maximum of five. However, you can have far more than five in your Inventory by completing the Daily Missions, as Health Packs are oftentimes among the rewards you can get from the prize bags as you accumulate more Daily Mission Points. Try not to go below five before completing such dailies, because you don’t want to earn free Health Packs that you can otherwise regenerate automatically!
7. Dealing With Submissions – How To Apply Them And How To Escape From Them
While most finishing moves result in one wrestler pinning the other, there are other finishers, especially for those in the Technician class, that end a match by making the opponent tap out. These are submission moves, and using them — as well as escaping from them — works differently from the usual pin-fall finisher. For starters, each submission deals out damage per turn for a maximum of three turns per use, and this per-turn damage goes up each time you upgrade the move.
Next, you’re going to have to make a match of three gems or more around those that have been marked as submission gems in order to break free — for example, if the opponent marks a red gem in the center of the board, you’ll need to match three or more red gems in that specific area to break the submission gem, then repeat the process with other submission gems as well. Failure to break all submission gems results in full damage getting applied, though that won’t end the match unless you or your opponent’s Health reaches Danger level.
Keeping the above in mind, you’ll want to choose the gems that are least likely to be matched, and preferably set them up in the corner when you’re marking submission gems. The goal here is to keep the gem as far away from the opponent’s reach as possible as they make more matches, so focus on those gems far apart in the corners, and don’t mark any color gem if there are others of the same color located just nearby.
8. Some Basic Tips For Winning More Matches
When it comes to winning more matches in WWE Champions 2020, we’ve also come up with a few pointers that you may want to keep in mind, whether you’re going through one of the many available Tours in Career Mode or competing in one of the other available game modes (Deadman’s Daily, etc.), where the basic gameplay remains the same across the board.
As is the case in other Match 3 games, it’s best to start making moves from the bottom of the board, but in this game, you’ll only want to go this route when there aren’t any gems to match that correspond with the colors of your special moves and finisher. Working your way up from the bottom-most match offers a better chance of starting a combo, as more new gems will drop down, thus increasing the chances that those gems will match with those that are already on the board.
On the other hand, it’s also a smart idea to play defensively from time to time, and that would mean making matches that correspond to the colors of your opponent’s special moves/finisher. This, of course, prevents them from charging up those moves, and if you’re lucky, you might end up stringing together a combo that somehow helps you charge up your own moves, thus bringing you closer to landing them on your opponent. (Of course, if one of your moves corresponds to a color that matches one of your opponent’s moves, you’re essentially fighting BOTH defensively and offensively, so that’s always a good thing when it happens!)
When talking about getting three stars in the Career Mode Tours and other modes, don’t worry if you only finish with one or two stars. All matches can be replayed at any time (except for Deadman’s Daily matches, which refresh once a day and can only be replayed within 24 hours), so you can always go back to a match where you finished with one or two stars and go for three stars once you have a wrestler that has a far higher rating than the listed opponent.
If you’re in the first few leagues and are, therefore, new to WWE Champions 2020 (if not the franchise itself), you still won’t be at the point where you’ll be able to face the wrestlers of other human managers. But even if you’ll only be facing AI-controlled Superstars in the meantime, the game still has a mechanism that discourages rage-quitting! (We haven’t personally experienced it, but we guess this also applies if you get kicked out of a match due to a poor or fickle internet connection.)
Once you rage-quit from a match, or even unintentionally quit out of an ongoing match because you left the app in the background for too long, the game will penalize you by “injuring” the wrestler you were using, or zeroing out their health. As we explained above, this will force you to use at least one Health Pack if you’re not willing to wait an hour — and even if you do, you’ll still need to use Health Packs in order to immediately restore their health!
There you have it! This ends our beginner’s guide for WWE Champions 2020. Stay tuned, as we may come back with another guide for the game in the near future!