Smackdown vs. Raw 2010 has decent gameplay but also comes with many glitches that get in the way of enjoyment.
+ Very comfortable fighting system.
+ New creation modes that manage to feel the same whilst adding more to explore.
+ Funny Commentary.
- Bad computer A.I. that stands almost completly still even on Legend difficulty.
- Way too many restrictions in content.
- Some minor clipping issues.
- Online is cluttered with hackers and greifers.
- Story Designer is bland and disapointing.
- Sexual Bias factor.
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I. INTRODUCTION
"Welcome to the WWE. Its a glitchy mess."
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Remember the old times of Smackdown! Here comes the Pain? Remember how awesome it was back in the time? I have it around my house somewhere, in a pile of dust. As the Smackdown vs. Raw series continues, its shadow to the superb start becomes less and less visible. We lose BAP matches, then targeting systems, and now we have more restrictions then ever. Now that it is 2010, we step into the ring to see what THQ has to offer. Sadly, the additions they make are a 1+, 1- pattern. But SVR2010 definetly provides a satifiying fighting system, decent creation modes, and content online. So if you don't have SVR2010, its not too late to buy it if your a fan of the series like me. If your not into the wrestling kind of thing, skip it or wait for 2011.
If you clicked on this review, as an experienced player, to have my advice on whether or not this game has changed at all, it hasn't. 2010 returns exactly like 2009 and 2008 and beyond. Alot of match types have been removed, exsisting modes have been ruined, and the A.I. is brilliantly stupid and passive even on Legend mode. There is a Road to Wrestlemania for a Storyline but its superficial. Less than 5 superstars are available to pick from in this mode, all suffering from bad voice acting, and it is just downright embarassing to even be seen watching divas tear each other's hair out on-screen in Mickie James' RTWM, ad the actrocious voice acting with it. If you want the rest of the game without the simply answer of "don't buy this", then read on.
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II. Gameplay
"The year is 2010, right? Everything is new, hopefully."
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For fans or newcomers of the series, it is a wrestling game with a very interesting control mechanic for the most part. In bare bones, the game is about beating your competitor up. Its a fairly simply process. You must mash the 'X' button to strike, right thumbstick to grapple, Right Trigger to reverse attacks, and 'Y' to perform a finisher. Anyone can grasp the controls easily because the game's computer A.I. totally sucks. Your opponent litterally just stands still while you knock him down. You can't remedy this by switching the difficulty because all bumping up to Legend mode does is make it so that your opponent can be laying down on the mat and be able to easily teleport to a standing position and reverse a chair attack in less than a second.
If your already fimiliar with the series, its the same controls but with some problems. Once small contrivance that wrecks most of the game is the fabously broken Targeting system. 1v1 matches aren't a problem, but in tag team matches or 3/4 mans, the targeting system simply targets your attacks to the nearest opponent with no input from you. Mash the target changer button all you want; the target system in SVR2010 is utterly useless. Furthermore, the game has way too many restrictions that limit some additonal features as well as severely imbalance different move sets to make some unblockable and others totally worthless. There are so many unblockable moves that a game like this demands a combo breaker of some kind.
A game-breaking restriction is, however, the elimination of intergender matches. A male cannot go up against a female opponent. Never. The only time a male and female can be in a match together is by means of manager matches, or mixed tags that involve male & female vs. male & female. That might sound all well and good, but it gets worse. A diva can smack a superstar around all she wants, but if a superstar merely shoves a diva, its instant DQ. Its concrete flat-out retarded, just tip-toeing on uselessness as an iditiotic feature with no decent explaination to why this restriction was added when it was not in previous titles. Smackdown! Here Comes The Pain would let divas fight even in Hell in a Cell matches, and now in 2010, a superstar can't even kick a diva off a pin. As far as I'm concerned, I heard there was a special hack to dodge this, in fact players constantly struggle to hack the game in order to set one superstar against two divas. So any lucky sap playing as the diva will be smashing his brains out with an ignited 2x4 and choking him with a chair, but he can't really attack anybody without getting a DQ. Talk about sexism...
Now then, what actually has changed for the series (believe me, you've already played this game....10 times) is SVR2010's biggest step forward for the series, specifically the rediculous fad of creation tools that suddenly came out of nowhere and jumped into the game. The first noteable one is a training mode. That's right, there has never been such a mode in previous games, and the appearence of such a basic mode at the Title screen does its best to welcome shy players into the underwelming action as well as show that the game is really taking baby steps forward. There's a list of several extras within the game that offer more complexity, some of which are good, bad, and unexplainable:
My favorite would be The Create-A-Superstar mode in the menu that is pretty much what you've seen before in the past. You start out with a fairly ugly looking person, and gradually edit his face, body, clothing, and entrance/attire to create the ultimate superstar. This is especially interesting when you find out that you can also add up to 3 alternate costumes, something that many of us have long awaited in the series. The catch, however, is the annoying and completely uneeded point system. Yes, there is a limit to the amount of attire you can put on your superstar. You have only 48 points to spend. 48 is barely enough to apply a shirt, a pair of pants, an over coat, and nothing else. Anything like glasses, hats, jewlery, and even hair take up a monsterous amount of points. A superstar that has a hat and a coat probably can't afford to have pants. It is unclear why this feature was added, where it was not located in previous games. It's listed in the manual as "to make superstar creation feel more real", but I beg to differ.
That aside, you have a Create-An-Entrance-Movie feature which is most welcome. Its extremly easy to use, although some of it is way too oversimplified. This consists of playing a singleplayer match, save a recorded highlight reel of you playing, and add camera angles or special effects to turn it into a movie. You can also add sounds and text, but for some unkown reason, it does not allow you to write your own text words. You also are limited to using the same match highlight reels over and over again since a movie can't use two highlight reels from two different matches. You also don't have alot of free memory to make your movie any longer than a 2 minute commercial. Nevertheless, if you manage to make a good looking movie, you can apply it to a custom entrance. The Create-A-Finisher mode allows you to take your created superstar to a new level by combining a strand of moves together to make a finisher. Will your finisher be a Super Powerbomb Kick, a Triple Tiger Slam, or a Double Backflip off the top rope? Yes, in SVR2010, you can even create your own diving finishers, from adjust the height projectories to the way you flip and flop around in the air before landing hard on either your opponent or the canvas. Personally, the diving finisher creation is a cheesy waste of disk space, as all finishers turn out looking stupid and unrealistic. Generally, there aren't as many selectable moves as you think, but you can make some interesting ground finishers with this mode at least.
My WWE, technically not a true creation mode, lets you adjust the statistics and abilities of different superstars. Its primary function, however, is more control over adjusting allies and rivalaries between superstars. If somebody is getting his attitude adjusted in the ring, his allies might come to help, while a rival will come to help KO him faster. Superstar Threads are an essentially weak feature of the game. They allow you to (get this) change the color of the attire of exsisting WWE superstars. That means that the Undertaker can take on a pink suit, and Triple H can go all white or red. Its been done many times in past games, so its nothing particularly eye catching. If you want more freedom in that cause, a helpful Paint Tool lets you create your own logo using a set of spray and paint tools. You can then apply it to a custom superstar as a tattoo.
Finally the Story Designer, the most overrated feature in the game, is close to being a complete disaster. At first, it sounds like a good addition. You can create your own story, whether its Wrestlemania Mayhem or Getting Fired. You can make a year-long story and choose what matches take place, script them to be impossible to win or easy, and throw in some backstage scenes or microphone rants along the way. You can assign any superstars to positions to determine who does what to whom, but you can only use your custom superstars 10 time in a single story, which is lame. You might be surprised to be able to add text or graphics or camera angles, but there isn't a whole lot of variety at your disposal, and there is less than 80 animations to use for scenes. Adding sound effects is even worse. You have to place sounds at specific spots on the timeline, which means the crowd will go "Ooooooh" 5 seconds before Big Show attacks with a sledgehammer. We can't expect something highly robust on a console, but with such weak programming, the Story Designer isn't all it could've been. Its also extremely lame for alot of diologue options to be censored constantly. Simple words like "title", "cody", "viper", "game" "help" are considered as swear words, and are completely restricted for little to no reason at all. Good luck trying to make a decent story, friend.
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III. Presentation (Graphics, etc.)
"My eyes can't take the brutality. Someone call the match off..."
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The graphics are extremely primitive, as character models look dangerously outdated. They haven't changed much, in fact, I saw absolutly no changes at all in the graphical quality of SVR2010 since last year. The character and object models, with their specular sweat shine and slightly crude texturing, look like they could be made easily with snipplets of the Unreal Engine 2. Also, since there is no hud being displayed (except for your momentum bar) on the screen, the visual apperance of superstars displays their health condition. If your chest has been chopped alot, it gradually turns pink and puffy. If you find yourself limping with your hand on your temple, you might've lost a couple braincells. Furthermore, if you are busted open during a match, the blood dribbles down your face and also continues to run down to your chest and shirt, and it might even splatter a bit onto your opponent. The Arena also looks just okay, despite the ugly crowds who look like stick maniquinns. Most importantly, the framerate in SVR2010 is just as smooth as it is important for a game to never lag. No matter how many fireworks are blasting off in the entrance scene and lights flickering about, there is no visual lag (although fog effects do drab the game speed down a bit). Nothing in the game takes a step forward in our graphical technolegy today, but the game is fine to look at.br />
The Sounds don't flonder either, although they aren't amazing. In-game sound effects are simply a bunch of muffled punches and kicks, followed by funny "Argh!" noises from a pained competitor. The Commetary still features reworks of the silly one-liners in a different way, but there's alot more "Ouch!" and "What a hit!" dramas that add more life to it. Either way, the commentary is hilarious (except for the lackluster chatter from ECW). I wasn't certain, but in since 2008 you were able to use your own soundtrack from your hard drive for entrances, so I would assume that feature has returned (for 360 versions only).The game also licenses a couple tracks, including Monster and Hero by Skillet, respectively. To add up with the rest of unexplained restrictions in the game, you can only use WWE soundtracks and none of the cooler songs at the title screen.
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V. Multiplayer
"I can't stand the l l l l l l l a a a a aaaaa aaagg g g g!!!!!!!"
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SmackDown Vs. Raw 2010 has online, and what's hard to believe, its more satifiying than anything in the game. It is extremly cool to be able to create your own superstars, and face against other custom superstars in TLC, Extreme Rules, Hell In A Cell, and even Battle Royals over the internet. Most of the online caws are less than imaginative, and some are rehashes of the default caw model, but if you find one that is pretty creative, SVR2010 also has an online community to download and upload user created content like caws, finishers, stories, highlight reels and so on. But when you actually step into the ring in-game with another player, you will most likely lose your barings quickly. There is a small amount of input lag online; sometimes to the situation where you hit the 'X' button and your character strikes 0.7 seconds later. Every game shows up with a red connection, and sometimes when you try to connect, it disapears for no reason. The iput lag itself It doesn't make the matches unplayable, it just adds alot of uneeded fustration where you have to plan your moves beforehand. The lag is even worse when your playing tag teams or 3/4 way matches. If one person disconnects, it often jolts the entire session, and sometimes all of the players in the session freeze completely still. In many cases, one player will regain control and leave the rest of the players frozen for the rest of the match. Gosh, JR; if Triple H can't even move, does Cena have a hoping chance to win?
You will eventually adapt to the lag in about a week's time, and you'll find online matches to be somewhat sharp. Yet, you still probably won't make a whole lot of progress. The Singleplayer portion of SVR2010 is insanly easy even on Legend mode, and the online opponents are awefully masterful and quick. It can take a half-hour to join a match because all the player hosts online have the annoying tendency to kick you out of the lobby instantly for no appearent reason. Your chances of winning are further rebutted by the excessive amount of move spammers online. SVR2010 is infested with greifers and so many move spammers that the community even has a crapload of "Clans" from different spam groups. From research, these "Clans" are players who have been with the SVR series since its started, and they are hardcore players who pledge their absolute loyalty to winning online -- usually through cheating. These types of players vary from those who spam unblockable moves over and over again until your pinned down, to downright greifers who purposely DQ yourself during Tag Matches and purposely disrupt your connection by leaving the match while it is still going. Anyone could expect things like this to be a hot issue on Ranked matches. But this kind of crap happens even on Player matches, in which there is no benefit to winning or losing. The rest of the kids on the block are absolute wusses who get themselves DQed by using chairs or disconnect from the match two minutes after starting. Mixed Tags are a nightmare; some idiot playing as the diva will simply run right into the ring, get smacked by a male, and end the game immediatly. Somtimes these matches are hacked and the next thing you realize is that your up against two females (hitting either one resulting in a DQ). Between dodging the spammers and the lag, its quite a mess. But as long as you know who your playing with, there are some good apples in the community, and online is the best replay value of the game. Too bad that doesn't say a whole lot.
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IV. Conclusion
"Ask yourself; is next year really worth it?"
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We all are pretty much slaves to THQ's programming and balance. As a fan of the franchise, it is unclear to me where this series is going. SVR2010 has alot that we all enjoyed, and you gotta like it for that. It also manages to add some more without feeling too different. Lastly, it accidently takes away or ruins alot as well, making for a standard wrestling game that is addictive but flawed. Now call me crazy, but I enjoyed 2008 (because I missed out on 2007). I thought "do I want 2009? Nah, I'll skip it and wait for 2010". I skipped 2009 and bought this game hoping that THQ learned from their mistakes after all these years.....
No. They did not. The online is garbage, and the offline has the worst A.I. I've seen in a long time. A variety of creation tools are cool at first but they really tend to be useless after you've explored all they have to offer. And furthermore, whoever thought that I girl can hit a guy without getting DQ is practical to implement in a unrealistic VIDEO GAME might be tripping.