411Mania.com Fan Forums: SvR 07

Yay for Europe getting it first!

Well, here are my thoughts after a couple of days playing it:

- First bad thing you'll notice: the load times are a real bitch. I think it's pretty clear that this game is really stretching the PS2's hardware (unsurprising, as it was concieved for next-gen consoles but got shunted from the PS3 when the console got delayed). I doubt this is a problem on the X-Box 360 version, but for the PS2...make sure you have a book, because it's a good 30 - 40 seconds in places.

- The new control scheme is an interesting idea but pretty counter-intuitive. I gave up early on and switched to a control scheme (it's D, in the options) that's almost identical to the prior entiries in the Smackdown series. I can understand wanting to change it to analogue sticks or whatever, but why change stuff like making attack square instead of X? Anyway, it's fine now.

- Gameplay is largely unchanged, except now you hold L1 along with circle and direction (or flick the right analogue if you're using the default controls) to do a proper grapple. Without L1 you do a quick grapple that's hard to counter (arm drags, snap mares, stuff like that). That's good and No-Mercyish.

- Pre-match mini-game is gone. It's replaced by a short animation (like a cut scene) of the wrestler's squaring up and the referee bringing his hand down to start the bell.

- The new animations are great. The counters all look really smooth.

- Lots of interactive stuff to play around with outside the ring, etc. I haven't tried out the 'fight in the crowd' area yet. Plus there's these new grapples you activate by pressing R3 that let you walk around with your opponent in a suplex or chokeslam or whatever (subject to your relative weight classes and stamina) and you can even dump them out of the ring, which is pretty awesome.

- Create an entrance no longer has annoying load times, as it gets a rolling preview in the background. That's cool, but you can't have a 'full preview' because the music won't synch up properly when you select it (the preview just repeats in the background, but you have to hit square to preview the music, so unless you time it perfectly, you won't get it how it'll eventually occur in the real entrance). Also I struggled a bit with changing camera angles. On the other hand, you can have pyros fire off exactly when you want so I have, for instance, a massive explosion go off when Darkness pushes his arms down after doing the little Brock Lesnar dance I use for his entrance.

- CAW is mostly unchanged except that the interface and controls are slightly different so it was difficult for me to do it as smoothly as before. There's also only about one decent long haircut (*sighs*). However, there's a new thing where you can select from pre-set colours instead of fiddling about with the colour chart like before. This is good for Darkness, cos it's just black for everything...

- How come I can't select the martial arts or luchadore movesets for Darkness? It could be to do with his weight class, so I'll have to experiment more.

- Talking of weight class, super heavyweights now no-sell almost anything a light-heavyweight or lighter throw at them. They literally just shrug off attacks - I tried to clothesline Big Show and just bounced off!

- Back to movesets: you only get 4 slots for rear grapples now. Initially I was horrified, but then I rememberd how boring it was trying to put in variations of bulldogs, back suplexes and sleeper holds in the old 10 slots, since no one really does moves from here.

- Season is a lot of fun. I have it on easy mode so I can just concentrate on unlocking and beefing Darkness up and I won the belt within a couple of months (no 'Virgil Runnels amendment' to screw you out of it this time...) and there's been two storylines since I won it that depend on me being the champ, so I assume there's a fair amount of variety (since there'd have to be alternatives to those if I'd lost the title matches). For some reason though, my CAW doesn't come out with the belt and it magically appears when he gets to his 'ring' animation. It may be something to do with the entrance moves I chose - again, I have to experiment with this some more.

- The Legends are cool. All three faces of Foley are in it, which is a nice touch, as well as the Hart Foundation and Dusty Rhodes. You get Eddie Guerrero without having to unlock him, which was nice.

- The commentary uses most of the same lines from last year. There's a couple of new things, but it was all fairly familiar. I haven't encountered any of the reported problems with it yet.

- The soundtrack is a lot better, in my opinon. Last year's was kind of...meh...but there's actually a couple of songs on this one that I enjoy listening to.

- There's all sorts of talk about the graphics but, honestly, I didn't notice the vast improvement that a lot of reviews seem to mention. It's better, sure, but it wasn't like 'wow!' like the step up between, say, JBI and SYM was.

In conclusion: if you liked '06, this is mostly more of the same with a few tweaks here and there. If you're after the seminal wrestling game experince....well, if you didn't have it last year then you aren't going to have it here either. I'd certainly say it's better overall and, if you have the spare cash, go pick it up. But if you hate the Smackdown series, or hated '06 specifically, then this one isn't going to improve your opinion.

I like it a lot though.

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Do any of you leetspeaking cocksuckers have the slightest idea of how to string more than two words together into a coherent sentence? If you do then come get your ass handed to you at Twisted Championship Wrestling: 100% guaranteed to be the only e-fed you'll ever see that's pretentious enough to sometimes approach real literature.