 Review By: Siou Choy |
Developer: | Yuke's Media Creations |
| Publisher: | THQ | |
| Genre: | Sports | |
| ESRB: | Teen | |
| # Of Players: | 1-4 | |
| Online Play: | Yes | |
| Accessories: | Nunchuk, Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection (online play, DLC) | |
| Buy Now: |   |
As you probably gathered by now, despite my love of the overall package, there are more than a few odd quirks to the game. Care for an example? In CM Punk’s Road to Wrestlemania, he’s being challenged by the popular Tag-Team of John Morrison and…Elijah Burke. As everyone who watches the WWE knows, the “Shaman of Sexy” is usually paired with the self-styled “Chick Magnet”, The Miz. Now, beyond being an inappropriate matchup in terms of current storylines, there’s another issue here - namely, that both Morrison and the Miz have made fun of Elijah Burke countless times on their WWE.com “Dirt Sheet” podcast. Hell, even back when he was with Melina and wrestling as “Johnny Nitro”, I don’t remember him tagging with Burke…
How about a few areas they’re really out of date? Santino Marella is paired with Maria (despite Beth Phoenix being a playable character in the game), and for that matter, his shtick isn’t half so absurd as it is in “real life”. “The” Brian Kendrick is still stuck in his old, nondescript tag team character, rather than the flamboyantly gay persona we all know and presumably hate. Ezekiel Jackson: nowhere in sight. Vladimir Kozlov: nope. “R” Truth and his pathetic “rapping” – forget it, not this time around (“now, you can get with this, or you can get with that…”). The Great Khali: no Ranjin Singh, no “kiss-cam” touting “Punjabi Playboy” persona here.
So things are a bit behind, right? There’s some advantages to that…which go sadly unexploited. Take HHH – why couldn’t we take the boring bearded water-spitter with a sledgehammer and play him as the far more amusing and effete ponytailed snob Hunter Hearst Helmsley, preferably with Chyna in tow? OK, maybe that’s looking a bit too far back. But on the other hand, you do get throwback stuff like Evolution and DX...so go figure.
Beyond the actual meat and potatoes wrestling moves (which are similarly out of date or inappropriate in more circumstances than I care to recount), there’s a bit more interactivity to the game, relating to wrestler entrances. As everyone knows, Vince has taken the entrance from its meager beginnings to a veritable art form, with wrestler-specific lightshows, fireworks, fist pumping anthemic themes, and choreographed routines. Here, you get to take part, building a little extra momentum (read: health) for your match through your entrance. Options flash onscreen at particular points between your appearance from backstage until your arrival in the ring. Like much of the game, some of these routines are dead on, but there are a few that totally don’t fit the wrestler in question. For example, I’m sure you’d agree that it’s perhaps just a bit hard to picture the Undertaker getting all worked up in a frenzy of fist pumping and slapping hands with the audience like one of the Hardy Boyz, but that’s an option I wind up with all too often…
Like most wrestlers, I have some serious issues with the ref. Regardless of the particular situation, this clown is too damn slow with his count. I’ve faced countless occasions where I had another wrestler pinned for longer than a three count, but the ref had yet to drop to the mat and even start the count. It’s not as if I had someone interfering with the match and preventing him from making the count – what the hell is he doing while all this is going on, sleeping?
The commentaries in the game are provided by their real-life counterparts on television. While this can be a good thing when you’re talking about someone amusing like Jerry (“the King”) Lawler, on the other hand you get losers like Tazz, Michael Cole, “Coach”, and JR. JR is particularly noticeable, with his usual asinine style of commentary. This guy misuses (and outright confabulates) words left and right – even Gorilla Monsoon didn’t mangle the English language to quite the level everyone’s favorite Okie does. And as if he isn’t annoying enough all by his lonesome, it doesn’t exactly help matters that the pool of comments randomly available throughout the course of a match is rather limited, to say the least. You can literally hear the same exact comments several times in just one match. To actually play through a storyline with these same 5 or 10 idiotic statements being repeated ad nausaeum can be excruciating. I think I’m repeating them in my sleep at this point, and I’ve only had the game for a week or two – it’s that bad.
One last quirk: the developers were extremely lenient to the wrestlers involved with Smackdown vs. Raw 2009. Wrestlers are uniformly designed as being far more muscular, and in far better shape, than they actually are. Outside of that, THQ really seems to have worked hard on getting every last detail down, from facial features to movements to tattoos – with the caveat that these things have changed, sometimes significantly, in the intervening months since development. The only major flaw involves wrestlers with long hair, which doesn’t flow very well and tends to look blockish. On the plus side, you do get several, if not all, of the actual wrestlers providing voices in the Road To Wrestlemania storylines…or at the very least, damn good imitators. Fooled me often enough, and in the grayscale world of wrestling (where the lines between reality and kayfabe storylines blur interchangeably as a matter of course), that’s good enough. Top marks overall.
Bottom Line:
Smackdown vs. Raw 2009 is quite possibly the best wrestling game I’ve come across to date. Generally speaking, graphics are well done, character quirks and mannerisms are accurately represented, theme music is in place, original (or close imitation) voices, and you get the same sort of storylines and feel you’d expect from Vince McMahon and company. When all’s said and done, it really doesn’t matter to me that William Regal doesn’t look like he’s supposed to, because Jeff Hardy does, and more people would rather play as “The Strange Enigma” anyway (gotta love that JR and his linguistic redundancies). The music is catchy and will be running through your head well after gameplay ends. This is one of those rarities, folks – high marks across the board from me. If only more developers put out product at this level of quality…but then, I’d have nothing to talk about for you good folks! Congrats, THQ.
| Pros: | Cons: | Final Score: |
|---|---|---|
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| 8.5 |
Posted: 2009-03-27 13:00:07 PST