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Videogames -
Reviews
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Written by Murphy Simmonds
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Thursday, 12 November 2009 15:21 |
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WWE Smackdown Vs Raw 2010
PS2/PSP/PS3/Wii/X360 (X360 version played)
THQ
"Wrestlemania is not just one night. It's bigger than life." It's a slightly lofty claim which tumbles out of a commentator's mouth in one of the Smackdown Vs Raw 2010 cutscenes - life is, after all, quite big. But it gives an indication of just how much hype is injected, steroid-style, into the bulging deltoids of the peculiar brand of entertainment known as WWE wrestling. It's not really a sport, more the mutant lovechild of a circus act and a soap opera, but since it involves large amounts of pretend competitive violence, it translates decidedly well into a videogame.
There's one key problem with WWE games, which stretch back a couple of decades, and that's that they stretch back a couple of decades. The range of meaningful things you can do inside a wrestling ring - grapple, throw, hit, run around and leap off the top turnbuckles onto somebody's neck - was adequately stuffed inside a console more than ten years ago, leaving the incarnations which followed with nothing to do but glue on extra bells and whistles: better presentation, larger (and updated) character rosters, more in-depth solo career modes, the ability to create a wrestler and a bundle of new match types (the ironically named TLC, for example, which grants participants involves liberal use of tables, ladders and chairs to club one another into unconsciousness).
 Legend has it that bells and whistles do not a new game make. But SvR 2010 has somehow broken the rule, cramming in so much extra stuff that it winds up being the best WWE game in years. Match varieties run into double figures, characters almost hit 70, a Road to Wrestlemania feature offers a bunch of slickly presented story arcs, career mode's approach to building your wrestler's stats and abilities adds depth, while the various creation functions are truly impressive. Along with designing your own wrestler and movesets, you can design finishing moves, logos and entrance movies. Best of all, for the true enthusiast, is a story editor which lets you chop up chunks of cutscene and text to build your own big branch of the ludicrous WWE narrative. It's a little unwieldy but it's a great new direction, plus it can be shared online.
The fighting, whatever its flaws, bears the evidence of a decade of refinement, and is as fluid and expansive as it has ever been. The result is a game which rewards the time you invest in it. Make your wrestler, design his moves and finisher, take him to the top and - if you have no job - build him his own story arc and SvR will repay you more generously than any title in the series to date.
8/10
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