WWE Smackdown vs. Raw 2009 : THQ’s annual loved and hated WWE wrestling game release.
Story : For wrestling fans, 2008 will go down as the year Chris Jericho carried an entire show on his shoulders, Mike Adamle stumbled his way to the top and thus proving that talent is nary rewarded, Edge went to hell and nobody raised any questions, the year everyone but jokesters forgot that a wrestler killed his family and himself the previous year, and the year TNA made absolutely no progress in their struggle to be anything but a second-rate WWE knockoff (a mentality that has carried over into their video game!)
My heart fills with trepidation every time a new Smackdown game is announced, hyped, released and left to disappoint the (approximately) one million wrestling fans who pick up a copy. It seems that for the past couple years, developer Yukes and publisher THQ seem to focus their efforts on developing shoddy gimmick matches, game-breaking mechanics and a half-hearted single player story mode, instead of correcting the game’s numerous existing flaws. The 2009 edition seemed poised to follow in those exact footsteps, with the entire PR being focused on an elaborate new Tag Team gameplay system and the addition of the “Inferno Match”, a gimmick match that comes to us about ten years too late from when an inferno match was last considered relevant. (If we’re looking to the past for our new match ideas, how about War Games? I’m just saying…)
Well, to the surprise of no one, the Inferno match is another lame duck gimmick that you’ll probably never touch again after playing it once, except in the instance that your friends come over and want to see it for themselves and thus annoy you.
However, what will be a surprise to everyone is how well the rest of the game turned out. By and large, almost everything that has been promised in this year’s game delivers, which is certainly a shocking revelation in my mind. They even silenced a few issues that I was thinking about complaining about; like how in previous games, there only seemed to be two different difficulty settings, “Gillberg” and “opponents that instantaneously counter every maneuver you throw at them.” By default, that’ll still be the case…but if you explore the options menu, you’ll discover an elaborate new menu screen comprising of slider bars that enable you to dictate how frequently the AI counters any type of move, how easy it’ll be for you to pull off counters, and several other options. I can’t state enough how grateful I am to see these options present in a wrestling game. Thanks THQ!
And thanks THQ for the new and improved Tag Team mechanics. I know it seems absolutely baffling for a WWE game to put so much emphasis on Tag Team gameplay when the WWE itself shows complete negligence to said wrestling style, but consider me surprised as I can’t think of another wrestling game to do Tag matches so well! It didn’t occur to me until recently that Tag matches in wrestling games are always broken messes where one partner does all the work, the AI is dimwitted and it’s almost impossible to score a victory. Because of such, players would only play tornado tag matches or battle royales when more than two people were involved. Here, the man sitting on the apron has plenty to do, but is limited in that cheating will lower the momentum bar that both partners now share. Double team moves are easier to pull off and now the partner can rally the crowd to get his partner in trouble to pull off the ever-popular “hot tag”, where if executed, he’ll come in with full momentum and knock down all of his opponents. On top of that, the AI is now (mostly) reliable and will either try to break pinfalls or protect your attempts at a victory. Suddenly, tag matches have developed a unique ebb and flow, becoming fun to play and have gone from the least occurring match type to see online to the most popular.
Speaking of online…the online service has made a small leap forward. Before I could almost never start a new online session…now I can! The netcode for Smackdown vs. Raw this year has at least improved that much…but at the same time, it seems that there’s at least a full second’s worth of lag to hamper your experience. Well, I guess it’s an improvement, but a franchise as popular as the Smackdown series should be able to afford the best online support money can buy. Somebody’s college dorm room Counter-Strike server shouldn’t be outperforming one of servers of one of the largest game publishers in the country.
Otherwise, the gameplay mechanics are by and large, the same as they’ve been the last few years. I’ve finally grown to accept the right analog stick as the means to pull off grapple attacks, which feel more intuitive here than in past games, where certain directions would result in a lengthy, canned animation of your wrestler locking up before executing a move. Certain wrestling moves are interactive, where your wrestler will pull off different attacks from say, a headlock, based on what you press with the stick. You don’t need to know much about the game to get by, but at the same time, I found myself being surprised by what new abilities I didn’t know about and stumbled across from experimentation, like chop battles in the corner or a good guy’s ability to fire up after sustaining enough abuse. The game has a considerable amount of depth to study, and most characters feel unique and true to their real life personas. Rey Mysterio can bounce off the ropes with ease while Randy Orton can grab the ropes for a pinfall.
Another new and much appreciated addition is the new campaign mode, Road to Wrestlemania. Gone is the General Manager or 24/7 mode of past games that left you to manage all kinds of stats that were anything but realistic and can best be described as Some Horribly Intentioned Tragedy of gameplay. Here, there’s no micromanagement, instead you pick one of six storylines (John Cena, Triple H, Chris Jericho, CM Punk, Undertaker and a two player-optional mode with Batista and Rey Mysterio) and play through a linear series of cutscenes and matches. While many little girls are going to be upset that Jeff Hardy isn’t in the mix, much less whoever you the reader’s favorite wrestler might be, that shouldn’t matter because most of the campaigns wind up being very entertaining. The stories are creative in their own way, in part because you’ll most likely never see them work on actual television, like a wrestler forming his own country or Tommy Dreamer winning a match. There are several nice little touches too, like the announcers talking about the present storyline to not make you feel like you’re just playing regular exhibition matches, and optional side goals such as “put your opponent through a table” or “make your opponent bleed” (you know, the kind of things that would only make sense to a wrestling fan) which allow you to unlock bonus content, they help make this mode feel a bit special.
And for those that absolutely must have a single player mode that lets them play as Festus, why there’s something for you too. Career mode lets you pick a wrestler, created or otherwise, strips him of all his stats so that he has the strength, speed and charisma of a koala, and lets you fight a series of choice opponents in order to win assorted championship titles. Your performance in each match will affect what stats and special abilities your character develops; use a lot of power moves and your character’s strength rating improves and so forth. The idea is nice in theory but I always hate games where the only way to improve a wrestler’s toughness or health rating is to get beat up. Likewise, the game wants you to use your created wrestler in this mode, because the game gives you no alternative for improving his or her stats to anything beyond jobber. Any wrestler you create will, by default, be a weakling and the only way to fix that is to go through this otherwise lengthy process. This presents quite an issue for fans that like to create twenty or thirty wrestlers, be it their creation or otherwise. THQ has promised a fix for this in January.
At the end of the day, it’s still a Smackdown game, albeit the most improved Smackdown game in several years. If you haven’t gotten sick of the Smackdown engine (we’ve all complained about the clipping issues in the past, but you sit down with 3DStudioMax and try to create 300 move animations, and then find a way to make them match 50 different wrestler body-sizes and then you can talk) and you’re not a Fire Pro Wrestling elitist who harps on everything THQ has thrown out since No Mercy, then you’ll be quite pleased with Smackdown vs. Raw 2009. No, it’s not perfect, but if the perfect wrestling game were to ever come out, we’d never have a need to buy the next yearly installment that promises us the world and gives us Snitsky. What is here is strong enough to make the plunge, and for what its worth, it makes the TNA Impact game look stale in comparison.
Pros : The wrestler creation tools are strong as always. You have a ton of possible clothing and attack choices for your wrestler, and plenty of ways to tweak their entrance. New for 2009 is the Create a Finisher option, which while not being exceptionally versatile (you’re choosing from a list of canned animations), can still be a tad interesting if you tinker with it. The roster doesn’t feel too dated, as while there are a number of wrestlers that have long since been fired, almost all of the current big stars are accounted for. THQ promises downloadable content in the future.
Cons : The Miz looks like an alien child. Commentary as a whole is still terrible in all regards. Some of the voicework sounds like it was done in a log cabin in the French Alps. In-game dynamic advertising…I don’t mind it when it relates to wrestling-related ads like merchandise, but I’m already sick of seeing the HMV logo splattered at various locations. No legends, as there’s going to be an All Legends wrestling game in March.
4 stars
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