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Platform: PlayStation 3, PlayStation 2, PSP, Nintendo Wii, Nintendo DS, Xbox 360 Genre: Sports Entertainment Number of Players: 1 - 4
The most glaring fault of the game is still the AI. Have a CPU for a tag team partner? Hope you don’t need him to help you in the ring, because they seem to forget that it is a “team” match and don’t bother to help you if you’re in trouble. The new fighting system is overused by your opponent AI so much, it borderlines cheating. It reminds me of the old NES and Super NES racing games, where you could be a lap ahead, and then as you’re rounding the last bend of the last lap, they somehow quickly catch up to you, beating you by a millisecond each time. This is supposed to raise the difficulty in the game, when in all reality it just irritates the heck out of us, feeling like we had been cheated, even though the AI didn’t “officially” cheat.
The multiplayer is still a funfest with friends and family. Unskilled players can button mash with little skill and still put up some kind of a fight to a veteran gamer of the franchise. There is nothing new really added to the different types of matches. There are the staples of WWE matches still available for you to choose from, including some of my favorites, Cage Match, Tag Team, and TLC…..they are still here and welcome with each evolution of the franchise.
The Create-A-(title, wrestler, belts, move sets, and entrances) is as a whole untouched from last year. Tons of options have been left wide open for you to create any of the listed above. This is the one thing that the WWE series has done well for years now, and glad to see that they haven’t made any major altering to it. You can spend hour’s just creating one superstar if that is your cup of tea. (My patience and ADD doesn’t allow me to put that much time and effort into a created superstar.) J This franchise needs a huge upheaval and new engine to take care of the major flaws that become more and more apparent with each outing, each year. The AI and lack of a real storyline that the WWE franchise is known for in the past makes this year’s Smackdown vs. Raw easily passable, especially if you own last year’s release. -jason- |
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Being
the umptimilliionth incarnation of the WWE series of video games,
you would think that they would have a better understanding of what
makes a fun and exciting game. The WWE games started in the 80’s
with the arcade Wrestlemania’s and have survived through the years
being “upgraded” with every new next-gen console and handheld. But,
unfortunately, unlike some game franchises, such as the Madden
franchise, that have been around just as long, the designers of the
WWE seem not to bother to fix with what is actually broken, and try
to pile on more and more extra features trying to hide the glaring
faults of the game itself.
Gameplay
wise, pretty much everything remains intact from the previous
versions of Smackdown, except for the new addition of fighting
styles. There are several different types of styles: high-flyers,
brawlers, submission specialist, dirty fighters, showmen and
hardcore type. This is a great concept, but poorly done. After a
fighter with the brawler style, raises his energy meter and stores a
fighting style icon, he is able to resist strikes and make all their
grapple moves irreversible. Each of the abilities assigned to the
move set feels natural; this creates even more of unbalance between
different styles then there was in the previous incarnations. 
Unfortunately
the single player has gone downhill with this outing. Out is the
original storyline, and in is 24/7, a pathetic attempt at an RPG
element style crash of combining General Manager mode with a
pathetic attempt at a storyline. You have to balance out your skill
and popularity with activities as movies, mic skills, R&R, and
keeping your injuries down. You still have the yearlong title hunt
with either a created player or a superstar, but with a few injected
voicemails, generic cut scenes, and tedious “skill building”
exercises’, it all feels reptitive and boring.