World Tour introduced Asmik/AKI's critically acclaimed grappling system, in which all moves are started by holds. Choosing to either tap or hold the A button will subsequently produce either "weak" or "strong" results once the move is performed, while a similar system is used for strikes. Wrestlers can also perform their signature taunts to help elevate their Spirit gauge and perform "Special" front and rear finishing moves when their gauge peaks.
In addition to single, tag team, handicap, and battle royal, match modes not seen in future releases include a WCW versus nWo tournament, round-robin tournament, and league tournaments more familiar to Japanese wrestling. Unlike today's wrestling games, World Tour features no create-a-wrestler mode, story mode, or ring entrances. It also makes no reference to championship belts and, upon the successful completion of a tournament, shows an illustration of a fist raising a gold trophy. A championship belt creation feature was touted prior to the game's release, but this was ultimately scrapped.[4]
Players can also attempt the "league challenge" in which a player must defeat several wrestlers from a given "promotion" in a row. Doing so allows a player to compete for that promotion's championship against a hidden character: Diamond Dallas Page (WCW), Wrath (DOA), Glacier (IOU), Randy Savage (nWo). Once a player has earned every championship they unlock "Whole World Wrestling", a longer challenge consisting of wrestlers from all four promotions. The championship match being against one of the two hidden characters, depending on whether Cruiserweight or Heavyweight was selected: Black Widow (a caricature of Manami Toyota) or Joe Bruiser (a caricature of Muhammad Ali) for Heavyweight.
Other features were apparently carried over from the style of the game's Japanese counterpart. This includes the enabling of bleeding despite the practice being forbidden on WCW television due to its more family-friendly presentation. Foreign objects can be retrieved from the audience and used outside the ring. Weapons include a steel chair, half a wooden folding table, a black baseball bat, and a barbed wire bat, the latter not being characteristic of WCW programming but rather Japanese hardcore wrestling.
20 of the game's wrestlers are from the WCW or the nWo, while the rest are international wrestlers who are listed under fake names.[5]
