Genre: Sports
Developer: Yuke’s
Publisher: THQ
Players: 1-6
Retail Price: $60
Availability: Xbox 360, PS3, PS2, Wii
Smackdown games are a funny thing. They’re almost like Madden at this point: if you like them, you’ll probably want to get this year’s version, and if not then there really isn’t much they can do to make you spontaneously be interested.
Oh, wow. That was the easiest review ever.
It’s true, though: the Smackdown series is, on the whole, a known quantity. The grapple mechicanics have evolved since I last played one regularly (Smackdown 2 for the original Playstation), and tons of features have been added, but it’s still Smackdown: right stick for grapples, square or X to strike and so on. It’s a nice logical layout for moves with a cootie-catcher-like expansion of options.
But much like people don’t watch Wrestling for the sport of it, the real reason to play Smackdown isn’t the matches themselves: it’s all the other stuff you can do. This year it seems as though a group sat down and said ‘Okay, what do people do in Smackdown?’ They made a list, and then said ‘Okay, yeah, make all of those editable.’ Create a wrestler for yourself (including the option to create logos and other artwork). Then give them a custom move set. Tack on some custom finishers, including a DIY aerial finisher. Make a custom entrance for your creation, and when you’re done with that you can create an entrance video to play on the Titantron (do they still call it that?). Once you have your masterpiece completed, you can then create a storyline for them to participate in.
It’s a simple fact of nature that it will take you at least an hour or two from the time you first put in the game before you can actually play a match. That is, unless you use an existing wrestler like some kind of tool. Creating your wrestler gives a more-than-healthy number of customization options, though it’s not as easy to tweak colors, especially for hair, as I’d have liked (it gives a full RGB palette, and I’m not artsy enough to know what to do with that). Interestingly enough, I set my character to ‘Crowd boos’ but they cheered anyway; I guess I’m just that awesome. There was some clipping with layer combinations (knee pads intersecting with the top of my shorts, and heaven help you with long hair) and ‘add lettering’ starts in the center and moves right, instead of remaining centered, but if you care about these things then you’ll probably put in enough time to do it right (tweak your outfit, create a custom label instead of the generic block letters and so on).
Personally, I'd drop the purple shorts
Creating a finisher is still as fun as it’s been in years past, when Dave would let me borrow his copies. Choose an action — hold, lift, attack, etc — and then add steps that unfold based on what you’ve chosen (you can’t powerbomb from a DDT hold, but you can lift them into a suplex). You can adjust the speed of the actions, but this just speeds up or slows down the animation, meaning slowing down a drop makes you look like you’re falling through molasses when the action around you is going at the same speed. Creating aerial finishers is nice, but you only have so many options (given that there aren’t many permutations to ‘dude jumps on other dude’). You can still create something unique, though, and changing the jump arcs was a nice way to make it your own.
Coming off of the created finisher section, creating an entrance seemed lacking. The advanced editor lets you choose from their selection of options at a fixed number of stages: character comes out, character at top of ramp, character walking down ramp and so on. What if I want to spend a lot of time on the ramp, walking back and forth? I wish the options would have been like the create a finisher mode, but seeing as you watch your entrance maybe three times before turning it off it’s not too big a deal. You can still use your own music, which means that my guy came down to The Tank by The Dear Hunter, which was — let’s face it — pretty awesome (though after winning enough matches, I did eventually get sort of sick of hearing ‘Eight wheels lusting for the lives of infantry’). As a (logical) aside, if you play online your custom soundtrack won’t carry over.
I was never able to create an entrance movie to my satisfaction. You can save clips from your matches, listed in the Highlights section after it’s over or by manually doing it in the middle, but they save as the type of match and the date, ie One on One Hell in a Cell, 11/15/2009. I’d have preferred I be able to name them, so I could say ‘Finisher through the cell’ or ‘Jumping from a ladder.’ I recommend you save your aerial finishers manually, because for some reason the clips would always end right before I took off. The movie creator takes a while to load, since it’s dealing with video, and from there you can trim it down, add effects or visual overlays and change the speed. I ran into trouble trying to make my movie when it told me I could only add clips from the same match. That didn’t seem right, but given how slow and frustrating it was, and how it would hardly ever be seen, I gave up and spent my time elsewhere (the feature exists to upload the video to Youtube, though with no custom music, but I didn’t get to try it out).
Creating a story takes time as well. A lot of it. But the loads are much shorter, so the time is spent with you doing things, and as I went along I frequently laughed, told my wife how much fun I was having (she seemed unimpressed) and wished that this had been around a decade ago, so I could have put in a few hundred hours with my friends (I have many, many created characters in WWF Attitude). My masterpiece was a pregnancy scandal, with the father of Beth Phoenix’s baby unknown: it could be Triple H or Batista, at least until John Cena steps up and says it could be him too! People get hit with cars, abducted, double crossed, fired, rehired, hit with pipes and it all ends with a triple threat ladder match at Wrestlemania with a briefcase holding the papers for the Right of Paternity over the ring. Yeah.
The overview for an event
I didn’t even get as in depth as I wanted to; you can edit the events of Raw, ECW, Smackdown and the Pay Per Views and I wish I would have included multiple storylines across the shows. The customizability is pretty in depth, giving you almost all the tools they had for the Road to Wrestlemania stories (mostly excluding just the voiceovers, but that’s okay because you can use text to make people swear) (god, my pubescent self is coming out right now). Camera angles can be changed and scenes cropped, so they don’t have to all look alike. Once you’re done, you can upload your creation for others to enjoy and download new scenarios to play, with all of the typos and bad grammar you’d expect.
Speaking of Road to Wrestlemania, if you want to play a ‘career’ mode, go with these and not the actual Career Mode. The latter is a series of matches with no context, useful for boosting your created person’s stats but not much else. It’s better than a Quick Match, I guess, but you don’t unlock much, unlike the Roads. In addition to the single player stories there’s a two player mode and created character story, taking you from the crowd at Raw to Intercontinental Champion. They unfold like the stories on TV, so fans of the show (or melodrama) should be pretty entertained.
Generally, games with created characters make you play the career modes to earn XP to boost their stats, but when a friend came over and we did a Quick Match I still got some points to spend, which is a great trend in games recently. If you use a created character in any local match you’ll be given a stat boost at the end, so you don’t have to trudge through single player content to get better.
I don't know when it happened, but tag matches are fun now
We do eventually have to talk about the wrestling, I suppose. There are, as always, a ton of match types to choose from, but both the Royal Rumble and Table matches can end far too quickly for me. Throwing people over the top needs to be easy: I’ve played plenty of games where tossing people over seemed almost impossible, and so being able to whip an opponent into the turnbuckle, or over the ropes and then get into a Quick Time Event battle to succeed/fail was a welcome addition. That doesn’t mean it needs to be easy to complete, though: an opponent can be eliminated at any time, no matter their stamina, and so I’d generally be alone in the ring, eliminating people faster than they could come down. The same goes for a table match, which only takes a finisher to end. In both cases it seems as though there should be a check on their stamina, and if they’re healthy enough then you can’t even attempt to win.
The wrestling tends to feels like a game more than it does acting out actual WWE events. This is mostly because I can give my opponent my finisher five times or more and still not have them be down for good; this was mostly a concern in ladder matches, which I hated at first because of their length and improbability (stay the hell down, Rey Mysterio!) but eventually grew to appreciate after a drawn out match between myself and Triple H that had an epic back-and-forth aspect to it.
For some reason, McMahon really looks like Billy Crystal to me
In addition to downloading wrestlers, stories and other created content, you can play online against other people. My experience with it wasn’t overly positive: many people seemed to be gaming the system, in ranked matches but waiting for their friends to join and kicking out unsuspecting though enthusiastic game reviewers. What little I was actually able to play was laggy to the extent of pointlessness, with a second or two delay leading to me getting my face bashed in repeatedly. I wasn’t able to play with a friend, though, so if you know people (who have better connections) then your experiences may be different.
The length of this review reflects how much there is to do in Smackdown vs Raw 2010. RPGs be damned, you can lose your life to this game for a few months if you want to. Creating your own stories is the single greatest advancement I can think of for a game of this genre, and I hope it’s refined in future releases. If you don’t like the Smackdown series then there’s nothing I or this game can do to change your mind, but even if you don’t like wrestling (or are, like me, a lapsed fan) you might find things to love. There are issues with some aspects of the game, but the part of me that wore nothing but Mick Foley shirts for six months* when I was 15 is totally excited right now.
* This is true.
