WWE SmackDown! Here Comes the Pain

"The best wrestling game ever!"

You know who you are, wrestling fans. Whether you're still in the closet or in the front row wearing an Austin 3:16 shirt, you just love the action, drama, and backstage insanity that is the WWE. You better watch out, because, as the title says, Here Comes the Pain!

With all-new gameplay, new match additions, and enhanced in-game mechanics, there’s no besting Here Comes The Pain in this category. If you’re a fan of the wrestling genre, and you absolutely need a reason to pick this up, this would be it.

The first thing that Smackdown veterans will notice is the body damage indicator displayed alongside the momentum meter. As you inflict damage to your opponent's body parts, the indicator shifts from blue to red. The more damage applied to a specific body part, the greater the effect the move has on that wrestler. Characters with lots of head damage may get up woozy after pulling off a suplex, and wrestlers with injured legs may hop on one foot for a few seconds after getting up from a takedown. Injured characters are more susceptible to submission victories, and Here Comes the Pain is one of the most enjoyable wrestling games to play when using a technical, submission-oriented wrestler such as Chris Benoit or Ric Flair.

Yuke's has overhauled the grappling mechanics in Here Comes the Pain, deviating from fast-paced arcade-style gameplay. Wrestlers now have a variety of moves in different categories, including quick, power, signature, and submission moves. You initiate a grapple of the specific type and then select a specific move during the initial grapple animation. This provides much more depth and tactical capability than in previous Smackdown games.

The reversal system has been brought to Here Comes the Pain, letting you reverse strikes with the L2 button and reverse grapples with the R2 button. Both at once will reverse the finishing Smackdown maneuvers. Each wrestler is ranked in technique. This ranking indicates how competent a wrestler is at executing reversals, and it's the key to defeating challenging opponents.

The system rewards you for learning the transitions that most wrestlers use for their finishers. It's incredibly satisfying to counter an opponent's finisher when you know it's coming, and it gets even better if you lay on your own finishing move afterward. There hasn’t been gameplay this awesome since N64’s No Mercy, I promise you.

There are sixty-five playable characters in Here Comes the Pain. Many newer faces are making their Smackdown gaming debuts; John Cena, Rey Mysterio, Scott Steiner, Victoria, and Goldberg, to name a few. Even a few wrestlers from the past have joined the party, like Roddy Piper, the Iron Shiek, Hillbilly Jim, and Nicholai Volkoff. Now, sixty-five combatants make for a pretty healthy list, but who’s missing may pose as an issue to some. There are a couple of established tag teams that were deleted from the roster, such as La Resistance, the Full-Blooded Italians, and the APA. Along with the missing are Spike Dudley, Billy Gunn, and Rosey. THQ could have left out some of the wrestlers who made the cut and thrown in some of the ones I’ve mentioned, but it didn’t quite work out that way.

The most significant feature in Here Comes the Pain is the revamped season mode, which provides for all of the drama and backstage rivalries of the televised World Wrestling Entertainment presentations. As you begin a new season, you can select a wrestler from either the Smackdown or Raw rosters and then choose whether each specific wrestler is a face or a heel (good or bad guy in wrestling jargon).

When the season mode begins, you'll find your wrestler has a variety of available options. Instead of roaming around an arena, you now select from a list of backstage areas where you can chat with other wrestlers. These choices lead to entertaining segments where you interact with the wrestler. Here you can start a brawl or recruit a tag-team partner, for example. Just be careful: Getting punked by The Rock on live television isn't good for your image. Your wrestler will also become involved in a number of story lines, including faction rivalries and love interests.

Here Comes the Pain is the best-looking wrestling game out there. The wrestlers are incredibly detailed, right down to their tattoos, lifelike physiques, and accurate ring attire. Their facial expressions during matches are also quite impressive, but perhaps most significant are the smooth move animations, which make every reversal, hold, slam, and counter look painfully real. The intricately modeled venues are just as accurate, although the pyrotechnics are inferior to those in WrestleMania XIX and WWE Raw 2. You'll notice that the lousy commentary from previous Smackdown games is replaced with some upbeat, adrenaline-pumping music, and that's a good thing.

With Here Comes the Pain, you get some new match types, including bra and panty, it’s a women’s match, and the only way to win is by stripping your adversary down to her unmentionables, first blood, which is pretty self-explanatory; the first person to make their opponent leak is the winner and the elimination chamber. I wonder which mode will be most popular with boys aged 13 to 17 ;)

You also get backstage areas loaded with weapons and interactive objects such as fully operative forklifts and motorcycles.As always, one of the biggest attractions in a wrestling game is the creation mode. Almost all of the WWE games have had a solid create-a-wrestler option, and this one is no exception. I mean that in every sense of the word; you can totally let your imagination run wild when building a wrestler. This year’s game introduces an entirely new interface, including a whole new batch of the tacky clothing.

Every year, creating your wrestler gets more and more tedious as the create-a-wrestler options gets more advanced, so get ready for a trial of patience. It’s all worth it; this time around you can give your creation entrance attire, which is clothing he or she wears out to ring but doesn’t wrestle in. You have tons of different clothing and accessories to play dress-up with, so you can be as creative as you want with little to no limitations. Unfortunately, you still can’t create your own entrance, but you can still make up your own animations such as taunts, winning poses, and the way your wrestler runs and walks.

Any wrestling fan worth their salt will love this game. As the wrestling game with the most depth, great playability, impressive visuals, and slick presentation, WWE Smackdown: Here Comes the Pain delivers in all the categories WWE fans hold in high regard. I mean, like I said before, this game is a must-buy, even if you're not a Smackdown fan. Buy or rent it!

Reviewer's Score: 10/10, Originally Posted: 03/30/04