NXT TakeOver: WarGames (2020): One Great War and Four Matches That Never Waste the Night

The women's WarGames opener is ambitious, violent and occasionally too crowded, but its biggest ideas land. Dakota Kai and Ember Moon establish the pace before the field gradually fills, and the match improves once the two-ring structure becomes less about waiting for entrants and more about creating team-specific combinations. Io Shirai's delayed entrance becomes the centerpiece when she finally dives from the top of the cage inside a trash can, giving the match its most memorable image. Raquel González gets the decisive moment by driving Shirai through a ladder bridge and pinning the NXT Women's Champion. That finish makes González feel like a future centerpiece while giving Team Candice a meaningful victory.

Ciampa and Thatcher produce the card's best conventional wrestling match by leaning into pain, leverage and body-part work rather than trying to compete with the cage spectacles. Thatcher attacks Ciampa's neck and knees, while Ciampa focuses on the left leg and repeatedly forces Thatcher to adjust his base. The pace is methodical, but the violence keeps it from feeling passive, especially once Thatcher's ear is split open and the match takes on a more desperate visual tone. Ciampa eventually traps Thatcher in a guillotine through the ropes, releases at the referee's count of four and immediately hits Willow's Bell for the pin. The finish is clean, logical and leaves enough tension for the rivalry to continue.

The strap match is straightforward and character-driven, which helps it after two more physically ambitious matches. Grimes spends much of the bout trying to weaponize both his own strap and the official strap, repeatedly targeting Lumis' eyes and using the leather to create distance whenever Lumis closes in. Lumis eventually turns the stipulation against him by controlling the strap, whipping Grimes across the back and preventing the escape-based comedy from overwhelming the match. The finish comes when Lumis uses the strap to help trap Grimes in the Silencer, forcing an immediate submission. It is not a classic, but the stipulation fits both characters and the match accomplishes exactly what the feud requires.

The North American Championship triple threat has a clever central idea: Damian Priest initially treats Leon Ruff as an accidental champion who does not belong, only for Ruff to keep forcing his way back into the match. Gargano exploits that tension whenever possible, briefly working with Ruff before immediately looking for an advantage. Priest's Razor's Edge through the barricade appears to remove Ruff, but the champion returns and gives the final stretch an extra burst of unpredictability. The finish becomes overbooked when multiple Ghostface figures interfere and Austin Theory ultimately attacks Priest, allowing Gargano to hit One Final Beat on Ruff and become a three-time champion. The match is fun, though the interference keeps it below the night's best work.

The men's WarGames match earns its forty-five-minute runtime because every entrant adds something distinct and Pat McAfee never feels like a celebrity being hidden inside someone else's match. Kyle O'Reilly and Pete Dunne begin with crisp technical aggression, the advantage periods give Team McAfee believable control, and the eventual arrival of Adam Cole turns the match into the rivalry payoff the story needs. McAfee's moonsault from the cage is spectacular, but the match is not built around one stunt; table spots, cricket bats, submissions and repeated finishing sequences all escalate naturally. The decisive sequence belongs to O'Reilly, who survives the chaos and drives a knee onto a chair across Oney Lorcan's face for the pin. It is violent, coherent and one of the strongest WarGames matches of the NXT era.