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WWE 2k23 from the perspective of someone who has zero intent on playing as anyone but custom characters:
The Good:
Customization looks more realistic than last game. I felt like in the last game there was only one decent looking face for both genders and the rest looked kinda horrifying, but in this game, it's very possible to have a decent looking character with many different faces. There are a few more options but it's pretty much the same stuff from 2k22.
Lots of entrances and movesets, though the Kofi Kingston trombone, as always, will definitely not line up with your character's mouth and you just need to accept that reality. You can customize teams, and teams will not fight each other in Royal Rumbles unless they are the only ones left at the end. If they're waiting for someone else to show up, they'll just taunt. That's nice.
Lots of characters to unlock with in-game currency got through playing other modes (but not My Rise, for some reason). They come with new moves, entrances, and victory animations, so they're worth picking up. I'd personally recommend getting Andre the Giant and Undertaker early, since there are few base game characters that sort of slowly lumber into the stage and you might want that in your characters.
My Rise has an actual plot this time instead of just being a bunch of random occurances. I'm not sure if it has an end yet, but it feels a lot more focused than last time where you just kind of... did things and made your numbers uselessly go up.
War Games is crazy but fun. It's nice to see them playing with new match layouts, I'd like to see some that maybe aren't as possible in real life in the future, like shrinking arenas, referee soccer, or something else. Give the game some spice that only games can have.
Fanny is back!!! I know nobody cares but me but she's the real OG. I like the mission with her where you just do mocap and some studio guy gives bored commentary instead of having a referee. Solid setting
The Bad:
NPCs talking look so ugly, and this is very apparent in the female My Rise storyline where the aunt character's mouth opens way bigger than it should, and she looks like some freaky dinosaur when she talks.
Teeth default to this weird grey color that looks really unnatural when you see it in the arena, so you need to customize teeth color. Eyes do the same, so you also need to make sure the whites of everyone's eyes look correct. 2k22 had better teeth by default, but the eyes were the same.
Mixed fights are reserved for very special modes, so it's not worth diversifying your custom characters. You pick men or women and stick with it, or limit the amount of fight combinations you have.
The game starts to really struggle when customizing fat characters, especially when more than one character is on screen. I had multiple crashes on one 500 pound character, and the game really chugged when changing her outfit. Understandably, a game about buff men punching each other might not be playtested for the morbidly obese, but I'd like my morbidly obese character to try on several shirts before I commit, dang it.
The pay for cards modes are still very much front and center, and as before, they're an eyesore in a game that really focuses on pushing less fun modes over its more creative options. I'd pay for a DLC customization expansion with more generic stuff, but I'm not paying for more wrestler cards that I resolutely refuse to use.
The game, like launch 2k22, is unequipped to handle a wireless controller plugged into a computer. Your menuing will be fine, but your character will stand still in fights. This can be resolved by unplugging it, but after last year, one might assume that they'd have the fix ready on day one instead of waiting to fix it once again.
The "every time John Cena lost" mode is cool in theory, but in practice, you're in control of different characters each time, fighting the same boss. It's kind of a bad game design decision to make every single boss fight the same guy, and makes that mode drag a bit, which sucks because it was like half of their marketing for this game. If Soul Calibur did this for a story mode, I'd quit the story mode. Gotta diversify the fights, and I'd rather lose as John Cena than win against John Cena many, many times.
Still only one voice per gender, which is a bit below standard for similar games with customization. Even being able to change the grunt pitch would give a lot more diversity to these characters, since outside of My Rise, all they're doing is grunting and yelling anyways.
Logan Paul is in this game. I cannot take him out of this game.