WWE SmackDown! Shut Your Mouth

"The best of THQ mushed into one DVD-sized disc."

Intro:
There’s one thing you think of when someone says ''Yukes'', arcade wrestling titles masquerading as a simulation game. The flagship series for Yukes these days, ''Smackdown!'', took a very hard fall when it left it’s arcade roots, the original SmackDown, at the door and added all the thrills and excitement of the WWE in Smackdown! 2: Know Your Role. Sure, it was fun, but it seemed like fun for the mindless and the gameplay didn’t really have a point to it. Ladder matches were often won on pure luck, not skill or timing. Hell in a Cell matches were nothing special like the match itself is in real life. Everything else, from the hardcore matches that featured weapons that did no damage to the throwaway Royal Rumble mode was lackluster at best. The highly anticipated Season Mode would turn out to be a chore most parents could give their children along with taking out the trash and sweeping the floor. Yes, it was that bad. The only highlight of the season mode was when a wrestler was attacked backstage by a randomly dressed CAW, then you would go on to face him/her and unlock some parts in the CAW mode. To unlock everything it takes six years, game wise, and roughly 70 hours of sitting through load times and one of five random cut scenes that repeat over and over. When the third installment rolled around the die hard fans of the Smackdown gameplay, who might I add enjoyed the first two go arounds immensely, flocked to the PS2 debut of the series. Supposedly ''Die Hard'' gamers and fans snuggled up with their copy of No Mercy and a warm cup of hot chocolate however, caring not about the harm Yukes was about to inflict. Smackdown 3 made very little improvements over it’s predecessors, including to the graphics despite being on a much more powerful system and DVD-ROM disc. This series introduced something often tried by fellow wrestling game makers EA and Acclaim, commentary. This was such a disaster that even those who worship THQ, Yukes AND Michael Cole couldn’t help but laugh. Obviously a product of copy and paste audio snippets the commentary featured random phrases mixed in with wrestlers names, moves or current situation. ''Jeff Hardy... ... ... looks great in... ... ... the Singles Match!'' There are 540 Michael Cole jokes to be made here, but let’s leave those alone for the sake of this semi-professional review. A disappointment at best with it’s nice CAW system it’s only saving grace, WWF Smackdown!: Just Bring It, along with the highly disappointing and undernourished WWF RAW and the pitiful WrestleMania X-8, instilled little faith in the majority of wrestling gamers that an incredible title would ever be released by THQ/Yukes again. Fast forward to 20 freshly sealed copies of WWE Smackdown: Shut Your Mouth sitting behind the glass case at Target staring yours truly in the face. Could this be Yukes saving grace? Could this be the No Mercy topper? Would this game make Japanese gamers want to import it, like Fire Pro has done for us? $50 later, I was about to find out.

Graphics: 8.3/10
An improvement? Absolutely, but there are some major collision detection problems that need addressing... and why do they seem worse this year? The first thing you’ll notice is that you’re wrestler will sink into the canvas after certain moves... a pretty good amount of them as well... sometimes up to their wrists if they are on all fours. Wrestlers, if they fall right, end up going through the guard railings at ringside, the entrance stages and each other. Maybe this isn’t a graphics problem, but it still needs to be placed somewhere in this review. The graphics as a whole are certainly good. There are times where you could be fooled into thinking you were watching a WWE program on cable, but that usually lasts only a second.

Sound: 6.1/10
First off, the commentary is better now, but why is that? Because the phrases are whole, not clips pasted together at random. This makes it tolerable. It’s not to say that after a week the phrases Jim Ross and Jerry Lawler say don’t get very repetitive, it’s just a whole hell of a lot better hearing them say the stuff than Michael Cole. There are also no ''male sexual relation'' references from JR or The King, unlike those Michael Cole said in Just Bring It. The entrance music is fine, the crowd is fine and most everything else is just ''fine'', in other words mediocre and average. Where the game takes a nosedive for Audio is the in ring action. The stomping sound for running can get on your nerves and never seem to stop when two guys are in motion. You really have to mute everything else, background music and commentary, to be frustrated by it though. These sounds, the running, the ''squeaking'' for ring ropes and impact for slams are all bland and over recycled from the first three games.

Gameplay: 9.0/10
Is that No Mercy I smell? Why yes it is! Like the title of this review says, THQ has put a little bit of all three of their wrestling games into this one. The game still plays and controls like Smackdown, but the matches play out more like No Mercy than the past Smackdown titles. No longer do weapon hits mean nothing, they not only do vast damage but have their own animations for even a simple swing. Whack a wrestler with a chair and watch them get smashed in the head with force, jabbed in the gut, DDT’ed onto it, knocked upside the head and more. Choke your opponent with a sledgehammer before jamming it into their face, trap them in a garbage can or toss them through a vertical table in the corner. Weapons are 400% better this time around, are normal size, and have meaning. As far a selling goes, it’s been fixed. You pound on your opponent, they stay down. Pound on them long enough, they lay on the canvas in a ''knocked out'' fashion... the same one that seemed to appear randomly in other Smackdown titles. This improvement makes the game worth buying because it’s what would have made Smackdown so much better two years ago. The reversal system is something out of RAW and Wrestlemania X-8, and while it’s no where near the overall bad system in RAW, it does rely on matching your opponents button command to reverse. It works great because you can get moves off, unlike in RAW.

Roster: 9.2/10
Just look at this thing... the best of the WWE, WCW and ECW all thrown into one. Go back three years. Hogan, Nash, DDP, Booker T, Ric Flair and Kidman were all franchise players in WCW. Raven, Taz, Spike Dudley, Rhyno, Rob Van Dam and Lance Storm were all huge stars in ECW. For the WWE you had Austin, Undertaker, Kane, Triple H and Rock. Seriously, if you create a few guys you could have a near Fire Pro D level roster for WWE, WCW and ECW guys. Best roster to date for any American wrestling title. There are a couple guys missing though... like Tommy Dreamer, Jamie Knoble, Nidia and Justin Credible. No one you can’t create though.

Create a Wrestler: 9.3/10
No more Sloth looking CAW’s! Whoo hoo! Yes, they look real now, very real, and the face system is vastly improved as is just about everything. Instead of getting 42 noses, two of which are normal, the other 40 are perversely deformed, you get a very easy to use editor which let’s you mold all the major facial parts to your liking. Same goes for the rest of the body. The amount of clothing remains roughly the same from Just Bring It with a few new WWE products, such as jersey’s and logos. The hair system is also improved and works like No Mercy, minus the ''Front Hair'' system. Select a pre styled head of hair, then color and boom, you have perfect hair. This year you can truly make your CAW feel like your own with a slew of animation options. While the highly rumored Create A Move isn’t in, everything else is. You can edit or create from scratch your own walk, taunt, stance and end of match animations. The system is like the one in Just Bring It but seems simpler to use for some reason. A lot more moves are in, mostly finishers and high end moves. Still no decent Burning Hammer from a back grapple, but they put in a load of new Neckbreakers, so what are ya going to do?

Entrances: 3.9/10
These things are horrible, honest to God. Sure, the maneuvers and walking animations are down cold (if not a little stiff), but everything else is just wrong. The only good entrances are this game that slightly translate into real life are Hulk Hogan, DDP, Goldust and the nWo. Explain to me why there ALWAYS has to be lights all over EVERY entrance stage that fade in and out between two random colors? Here comes Kane! The arena has fallen blood red, hell fire and brimstone is raining down, haunting images appear on the TitanTron... and there are six pretty blue lights in the middle of it all. THQ does this crap just to aggravate people, I swear. By some miracle there is such a modern electrical invention as A SPOTLIGHT in your wrestler’s seemingly stock entrance it’s shaped like an octagon rather than a circle. I know a guy who DJ’s at a club and he’d kill for a spotlight that produces a octagon shaped image, THQ however must have all the good hook ups. Quick question... how is it that Triple H’s body flashes with the four basic colors while inside the ring... but the ring doesn’t? Can he magically radiate a flashing sequence out of his steroid injected biceps when he wants to, or is THQ just jerking our chain again? They were bad in Just Bring It and they are only slightly better here. Yeah, there’s a Spiderman entrance, but they should have taken the time it took to animate that into fixing the lighting problems. Attitude had better lighting, on a weaker system, three years ago... damn. Pyro is also off cue most of the time.

Season Mode: 7.0/10
Yeah, the best season mode ever, but that isn’t saying much. It’s basically Smackdown 2 with entertainment value. The storylines and champions all reset after you complete one go around and to keep things fresh you’ll have to choose different answers than in pervious games. Small things, such as no matter what Kurt Angle is getting his head shaved, drag it down. The formula is basically Feud, Match, Match, Tag Match, PPV Match, repeat and it just goes on and on. I’d say they should have had this in SD2, not SD4.

Overall Score: 8.6 (rounded to 9)

Best Feature: Vastly improved, No Mercy like gameplay.
Worst Feature: The Entrances.

Pros:
: Create a Wrestler is back and better than ever.
: Awesome and 90% up to date roster.
: New animations and moves, some old ones fixed.

Cons:
: Clipping and collision detection are bad.
: Entrances suck. Want to hear it again? Alright, they suck... for the most part.

Buy, Rent, Forget: Buy if you like the Smackdown series or are at least willing to give it another chance after Just Bring It. If you just don’t enjoy the series you might not be able to look past the obvious Smackdown image to find the No Mercy style of gameplay, so I suggest a rental.

''Big Show... ... ... was great last night!'' – Michael Cole, Just Bring It

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 11/19/02, Updated 11/19/02