WWE SmackDown! Here Comes the Pain

"Remember when wrestling games were fun?"

Well, the wait is over, finally the new installment of THQs Smackdown is out. Was it worth the wait, or should it have been delayed? Are there enough new features to make it worth buying, or is it just a lame copy of the last one? Lets get down to the review.

Graphics: The new graphics are simply put, amazing. The wrestlers look ten times better than the last one, at least facially. The moves are all fairly fluent, except for the occasional flaw here and there, but thats to be expected. Hair finally moves semi-normal. It still moves by the chunk, but theres more chunks moving now.

AI: The AI is much improved. You cant single handedly win the Royal Rumble using 2 moves, you cant cheap your way to victory every time.

AI problems: This may be more of a gameplay issue, but the enhanced AI seems to have gotten better by reversing more often. So often, that it can easily become impossible to win some matches against low card wrestlers. The matches follow the typical Wrestler A beats on Wrestler B, Wrestler B reverses and beats on Wrestler A etc. Its when the circle ends and every comeback is reversed that things get out of hand and extremely cheesy.

Sound: The sound is pretty horrible. I think Ive heard 2 songs with any lyrics to them at all, and neither were good. Theres no commentary, which is good and bad at the same time. Id love to have the commentary that companies like EA Sports turn out, it may not always make perfect sense, but at least it matches the moment. No commentary is better than the commentary on the past WWE games though. Ross and King always sound bored out of their minds when they speak, their move-by-move is always off etc, so in this case its a step up. What did they replace the commentary with? Crappy arcade style music that will get on your nerves pretty fast.

Gameplay: Gameplay has also been changed allowing for many more moves than ever before. Grapples are now categorized into power, favorite, submission and quick shots with 4 moves in each category. It takes a minute to get used to, but its not a drastic inconvenience.

Now onto the bad parts of the game play, the reason why the game got a 4/10. For most players, the Smackdown series key feature is the season mode, where you can create or take a current superstar through a WWE career, win titles, start fueds etc. Its the key selling point. This year they revamped everything, some for the good, some for the bad. CAWs can no longer become heavy contenders to any title within a year. Now they have to be developed into stars by fighting lower ranked wrestlers and moving up the card. Makes perfect sense. The problem that seems to happen is the match scheduling system is a bit off. Your star starts to rise, gets a few wins under his/her belt and suddenly youre in a squash match against someone who you shouldnt even be looking at, let along fighting (EX Taker, Angle, Lesnar). You take a beating, lose some hard earned superstar points (SP represents your overall standing in the company, higher SP=higher profile matches and title shots). Repeat the process enough and you start to lose faith about ever becoming even a mid carder. Now throw in an occaisional fued with one of these superstars and watch your SP plummet.

An odd note on this: when going for the tag titles early in your career, you'll get an option for wrestlers available for partners. Generally, it consists of wrestlers who have no business being your partner. Win the gold, talk to your partner backstage and watch them insult you and occasionally fight you. Seems a bit odd to me.

Another major flaw that I mentioned above is the reversal system. Something has to be done to fix it. Instead of 1 magic button to counter everything, THQ changed it to 2 buttons, 1 for grapples, 1 for strikes. Simple stuff. The problem is that neither works all that well. You can pound all day long trying to block a punch and get nowhere. You can slam on the grapple reverse button for hours and not get anywhere. On the other hand, if you start to mount a good offense, the computer will reverse each and every thing that you do. The up side to this is that you cant beat guys you shouldnt beat right off the bat. The bad side is simple low card guys like Rikishi and Ultimo Dragon can become almost impossible at times if they go on a reversal run.

CAW: The CAW options are basically the same as SYM with nothing all that new to brag or complain about. The superstar point system is all new though. Instead of just maxing out a few fighting styles to get to the good moves, you have to individually assign your points into 5 areas, each with a unique and important purpose to your star. You can max out one or 2, but be lacking heavily in other departments, which will really halter your success rate. The good news, you gain more experience points to play with every time you have a match, win or lose. Winning provides 12-25 points, losing generally gives 3. You can also get points for getting a wrestler to train you in a backstage encounter, as well as other encounters. Give it a season or so and your wrestler might actually be fun to play, if you set him up right. If you dont, back to the drawing board, the points arent transferable to other attributes. Not a bad job on this one overall. Its nice to have to earn titles.

Unlockables in HCTP are pretty sweet. They finally heard our calls for legends, giving such names as the LOD, Jimmy Snuka and The Million Dollar Man as unlockables, plus the Iron Shiek and Rowdy Roddy Piper from the start. Very cool stuff here and probably the only reason Im still playing the game.

Overall: The eye candy and legends arent enough to make this game what it could be. There are some good steps forward, but too many backward to make this compare to other Smackdown titles.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 11/01/03