Smackdown vs. Raw 2008 (Xbox 360) Review

Posted by Ty Huston on 01.11.2008

Vitals

Genre	Wrestling
System	Xbox 360
Release Date	11/13/2007

The rookie of the 411Games crew takes on the latest from the THQ/Yukes franchise.

Greetings 411maniacs! My name is Ty Huston and I’m the new resident n00b around the writing staff here at 411mania and more specifically, the Games division. I’d like to take a moment to thank Ashish and Ramon for giving me the opportunity to join the staff here; it should be a lot of fun.

A little about me: I’m 27, married, and I live in Fort Collins, Colorado. My day job is spent estimating construction projects. Yeah.

My main focus is going to be working up some quality previews of upcoming games, but I decided first that I’d start with a game that hasn’t been reviewed yet on 411mania, but should. It’s a well documented fact that 411’s roots come from professional wrestling, and I have personally been a reader of the site for probably 6 or 7 years. Which brings us to today’s game – Smackdown vs. Raw 2008 for the Xbox 360.

After renting this game and playing it for a few days with my kids, my first impressions of Smackdown vs. Raw 2008 were that it was a quality game from the mostly excellent graphics and animations to the finally acceptable gameplay from this series. Historically, ever since I played the very first Smackdown game on the PS1, the controls and gameplay have been pretty awful. Not awful in the “I can’t even play this crap” sort of way, but just definitely more difficult to play than say … The Crown Jewel of Wrestling Games (© Ty Huston 2008) – No Mercy for the N64.

After owning the game now for a little over a month or so, overall, it is a satisfying wrestling experience on the X360 and I give it a good recommendation. What gripes I do have about the game are detailed below and I’d like THQ to focus on them if they do end up reading this, because unfortunately Yukes seems to continue their own path and haven’t any lessons from the games AKI made for the same publisher over half a decade ago.

Here is how the game stacked up to me:


Graphics



"Hey Kane, see that? That's your push. Don't cry, I sent it with some personalized stationary so it can write and you two can reminisce."

The graphics used for the game are actually quite good, really. Between John Cena's sweat dripping off of him post-match to watching Bobby Lashley close his eyes and smirk during his entrance pyrotechnics, it is quality through and through.

That is, for the male wrestlers, however. The female wrestlers look terrible. Sure, you can add or adjust things yourself thanks to the create-a-wrestler mode, but the female wrestlers simply don’t look good. In this day and age, after all the technological advances that games like Half-Life and such have come up with, it still amazes me how wrestling games still have the women shaking their hips on their way to the ring like they are trying to bust in half. Another point, in one cut scene that you'll get used to during the 24/7 mode, your wrestler will stumble in to the women's locker room before his match. It really, really looks scary. A lot of the women look like drag queens. I’d say the worst one is probably Lillian Garcia. Wow. It’s bad. Facial detail is horrible on a lot of the women. If you didn’t see some of the women’s digital versions along with their picture and bio during some of the load screens, you’d never know who some of them were. How THQ can have one sex look so good and the other look so bad is beyond me. I will give them this, however – it’s better than it has been in the past. They’re getting closer; they just haven’t perfected it yet.

Same goes for animation flaws, such as clipping of your opponent through you and such. If I do a top-rope Tiger Driver to the Great Khali, he clips entirely through me. That's just insane. But I’ll get to that later.


Sound

One other thing that pissed me off about the game was the sound. Music and voice acting were actually pretty good, but the announcing - as always - was atrocious. On RAW, Jim Ross would say stupid crap about eating barbeque while Lawler yakked it up. He'd make claims about the match not ending until both men were slobberknockered to death, and this would happen after the pin fall and the bell rang. Joey and Tazz simply bicker or talk about how great Tazz was back in the day. JBL and Michael Cole do the best job of actually putting stuff over in the ring (interesting how fantasy parallels reality, eh?), but still suck overall. Somehow, someway, a damn wrestling game is going to need to find a way to make the commentators actually call a match. I know, it's not easy, but if you're not going to do it right - why bother at all? The smartest thing that they could do in the future with announcing in the matches is to call the action in the ring and link the announcers calling wrestling moves to the moves in the game. That would be a lot like old-school announcing, but it’s probably the only way to really make it work in this game. The announcers putting over stuff during cut scenes and what-have-you is great and it works well. Trying to put over anything other than the match during the match isn’t working.


Fun Factor



The groovy new enviromental grapples allow you to smash your opponent into ... you guessed it ... your environment! I'm still waiting for the Bam Bam Bigelow-esque Gorilla Press toss into the front row.

Honestly, the game is pretty fun. I've been playing it with my two daughters (Yeah, both my little girls are wresting fanatics) and we've had a good time. They enjoy playing my opponent and watching me kick the crap out of the guy and we give each other high fives and stuff after I powerbomb some loser like Kenny Dykstra through a flaming table.

The game has most of the pieces put together; they are just missing some sections.

The games various modes are plenty of fun. The Create-A-Wrestler portion is quite good, providing you with plenty of things to adjust on your wrestler from his looks, to licensed tracks for his theme music (Having Edge's theme by Alter Bridge is a bonus point from me *wink, wink*). What is especially interesting about the Create-A-Wrestler mode, is that beyond a few other pre-fabbed wrestlers (such as John Cena), my character actually looks better than the entire WWE roster. Kudos to THQ on that end.

The 24/7 mode with the storylines and such are pretty awesome. I actually enjoy playing SvR'08 more than watching the current WWE product. Why? Because as sad as it is to say, the SvR'08 storylines in 24/7 are actually better than every single storyline that WWE put on television in 2007. They should seriously look in to the guys who wrote the storylines for the game and consider hiring them, because their stories make sense and actually are entertaining.

The storylines do have some flaws, however, and I don't think it is directly linked to the stories themselves, but the computer's AI when putting the stories together.

For example, if I am having a feud with Chris Masters over Torrie Wilson, I still hobnob with Masters and two or three other guys I've just finished feuding with (or who are tossed in to the middle of this crazy story) before my match. Why the game chooses those particular people for me to give high-fives and fist-bumps to? Who knows. Also, after my feud with Masters finished up rather abruptly, Edge worked his way in and pulled some crazy shenanigans to try and win her over. So she acts all strange and lovey-dovey after I kick his can, throws me some extravagant after-win party when I beat Randy Orton for the WWE Championship following my destruction of Edge, -for which I get charged, of course- and then disappears completely.

What the hell?

All is not lost, however, as guys like Johnny Nitro (John Morrison now, kids. Which is stupid they released him as Nitro considering he's been going with the Morrison gimmick for over 6 months now), Chris Masters and any and all of the women actually do more voice acting in the game than on-screen acting on television.

Another gripe I have is that so far I've had several opportunities to change brands and made that choice. However, I am still on RAW. Four different times I've been given that option. Still on RAW. I've had the option to choose allies or opponents for matches. Always ends up wrong. Somehow, they have a serious bug in the game when it comes to making these selections in storyline mode. Way, way not cool.

Even worse? After being the WWE Champion for the past 3 months and battling with the McMahon family, Stephanie wanted me to drop the belt or pay an even higher price. Being a regular stud like I am, I chose not to forfeit the belt.

Can you guess what happened at the next show?

That’s right, I’m no longer the champ. I chose one thing and the opposite happened. These are just absolutely terrible, ridiculous flaws that made it into the retail release of this game. Sometimes these option menus work, sometimes they don’t. I’ve e-mailed THQ about the problem and still haven’t got a response yet (it’s been two weeks).

But the storylines are fun for a lot of other reasons, like pissing off Vinnie Mac and him demoting my pay to $1 a week until the next PPV. That's just awesome.


Gameplay



Just when you think that Triple H can't hold you down anymore, he racks your nuts and points fun at you in front of millions of fans across the world. Asshole. Could be worse, he could say I raped a corpse ... oh, wait ...

Wow, what a difference a year makes for gameplay. I owned Raw, Raw 2 and Wrestlemania 20 for the Xbox along with SvR'07 for the X360 and I can tell you that the gameplay is much, much better here than in ANY of those - hell, it's better than they could possibly dream. A few issues here, too, however.

First of all, as with virtually all of the Smackdown games since their inception on the PS1, it's nearly impossible to choose what opponent you want to attack. Hell, sometimes the game picks the ref or your tag team partner because it's following the W.O.S.S. or Wonky Opponent Selection System as I call it.

Now, back in the day, when we had games by AKI and the fabled Crown Jewel of Wrestling Games (© Ty Huston 2008), wrestling fans adored those games. Why? Two reasons – depth and ease of gameplay. Simplistic, yet powerful controls. That game gave you a button to use for selecting whose arse you wanted to kick. It'd rotate through your opponents on the screen, including the referee or tag team partner, but it at least put that power in the player's hands. That is one item sorely missing from all future WWE games since No Mercy and will continue to plague the game until it is corrected.

The next item is the controls themselves. While they are slowly reaching closer to a more simplistic system that still gives you plenty of flexibility, they are still fairly difficult. I understand that the Xbox 360, Wii or PS3 controllers have a ton of buttons and they want to utilize them, but come on. With each release the controls change and we have to relearn how to play a wrestling game. The four game franchise that AKI put out (WCW vs. nWo World Tour, WCW/nWo Revenge, Wrestlemania 2000 and the CJOWG ) all followed the exact same control scheme but simply added more stuff to it with each game. By the time No Mercy came out, you had a ton of options to choose from, but if you got bored and wanted to relive the days of World Tour, you could easily pop it in and rock their socks off. The issues I have with this game are related to the strong grapples, which require you to use the RB button and up or down on the Right Stick. From there, you have to push the Right Stick in one of the four directions to pull off a move. I don't have many issues with the X360 controller, but it would have made a lot more sense and allowed more moves to be done if they has used the RB and Right Stick, in any one direction, to apply a strong grapple and then use one of the directional pad (which is unused) buttons to pull off a move. That would give you the possibility of 16 different grapples on the Strong Grapple side alone. The same method could have been applied to weak grapples, minus the use of the RB button. There's another 16 different grapples that could be assigned. In all, that would provide the wrestler with 32 grapples not including their finisher(s). Wrestling fans don't want storylines about Candice Michelle thinking they are hot and wanting to leave Chris Masters for them (although it’s a nice touch, it’s not the meat of the game) - they want dynamic controls that are simple, yet powerful and diverse. THAT is what No Mercy had that people loved.

Other than that, the match-types are very good with excellent controls, same goes for the environmental grapples. The addition of the Extreme Rules match is definitely a bonus as well, and any old school ECW fan should love it (I know I do).

Another thing that is pretty much retarded is the lack of size recognition in the game. Now, look. I understand that SOMEONE will want to create X-Pac and have him give The Great Khali a running power bomb, but can we at the very least TRY to make it realistic? Like I said earlier, I gave Khali a top rope Tiger Driver that caused clipping. Then, I gave him a top rope side slam. My created character weighs 275 lbs. Sure, he's a pretty big boy. But he isn’t THAT big.


Lasting Appeal

I can see myself and my kids playing this a lot until the next installment comes out. Overall good graphics and good game play make for a good game. That's about all there is to it. Smackdown vs. Raw 2008 is thus far the best title in the series, but THQ really need to figure out what they've done with the Smackdown games and its game play and reinvent it more similar to the old No Mercy controls. I know every wrestling fan/gamer says the same thing - but it's true. Fun controls makes for a fun game. There should be no excuse why these games are continually panned by critics for its subpar game play. It's not like a different company produced them. Sure, Yukes built the game instead of AKI, but whose fault is that? THQ is the same company that made No Mercy and therefore this shouldn't be an issue - yet two generations later, it is. Sad, really.


The 411

All in all, Smackdown vs. Raw 2008 is the best of the series thus far, but has a long way to go if it wants to be crowned World Heavyweight Champion of Wrestling Videogames. There are some advantages, however. ECW is better booked in this damn videogame than they have been since the brand restarted! How sad is that? Smackdown and RAW actually, you know, COMPETE here. Sure, I could never make the jump to Smackdown like I wanted to, but at least Teddy Long was TRYING to get me to jump brands. Watching current wrestling TV is watching "SmackRAWECWdown". Anybody from any brand can just show up at anytime, nobody cares, or what else. The booking in this game gives one hope beyond Hornswoggle McMahon's and blown up limos. Props to THQ for keeping it real with the storyline mode. Now, just tweak it a bit more and make sure that the bugs are gone before release. There are millions … and millions of wrestling fans still out there that would buy a quality wrestling game for a current generation system if it were truly excellent. We have had “okay” to “good” since No Mercy in 2001, but not “excellent”. Keep working on it guys, you’ve almost got the formula right.

Graphics	8.5	Great quality for the men, but the women's poor adaptations and animation issues are pretty obvious in this one. Overall animations are pretty darn good, though.
Gameplay	7.0	When you're actually playing, it's usually a lot of fun. Don't dare try a Money in the Bank Ladder Match or even a handicap match without backup. You'll be stuck attacking the wrong guy nearly every time. Plus, the major bug with the selection of options
Sound	8.5	Quality music and sound effects, but the announcing is atrocious and serious thought should be given towards revamping that system.
Lasting Appeal	8.7	As with any wrestling game that doesn't make you want to barf (like WCW Backstage Assault or WCW Nitro), it should have a pretty good lasting appeal factor. Or, it should at least get you through until next year's $50-$60 installment.
Fun Factor	9.0	Regardless of all the flaws, I find the game to be a lot of fun and it's a good one for me and my kids to team up and play together. I give it a thumbs up, but a shaking head towards stuff that should have been fixed this time around.
Overall	7.5   [ Good ]