WWE Smackdown vs RAW 2010 marks the tenth entry into Yukes’ annual wrestling franchise. It’s a series that has progressed painfully little in its ten year history, and the latest iteration is no exception. Criticisms of the series in the past stem mainly from the games’ inability to recreate the feeling of the WWE television shows, and instead attempts to create an experience that legitimises what is essentially a fake sport. And this year you’ll find no remedy to that problem.
One of the key features of Smackdown vs Raw games over the years has been the various custom creation modes, and these all make their return this time around. The Create-A-Wrestler, Create-A-Finisher and Create-An-Entrance are all back again, and still remain to be the best features the game has. In addition, a new Create-A-Story mode has been added to the stable. In this new mode, players are given the tools to create a range of cutscenes with spaces for dialogue and different animations, and the ability to implant any wrestler, diva or commentator into the scene that you see fit. Some of the pre-made scenes at your disposal include wrestler on the microphone in ring, commentators chatting between segments, backstage encounters, and of course the modern day classic: wrestler gets hit by a car while leaving. Humourously, it even allows you to place multiple iterations of the same character into the same scene, for those hoping to run some sort of “long lost twin” angle. The tools are a little awkward to work out at first, but with a little time you’ll be creating your own classic pro wrestling melodrama that Freddie Prinze Jr. himself would be proud of. Beyond creating cutscenes, the tools also allow you to schedule matches and stipulate outcomes and goals, thus giving you the ability to create an entire storyline if you so desire. All custom stories, entrances and wrestlers can be shared over the internet, and at the time of writing there was already hundreds of each to choose from. Quality will naturally be hit and miss, but that’s what you get with user-generated content.
Beyond the robust creation tools however, and where the actual gameplay starts, this is where SVR2010 (much like its predecessors) begins to fall down. The fundamentals of how action takes place in the ring has changed little since the first WWE Smackdown! on the original PlayStation, and it’s a system that has been showing its age for a while. The animations for wrestlers are probably the most obviously aged aspect, with action awkwardly changing from really stiff movement (where the wrestlers look like they’re walking with pole stuck up them) as you move around, to executing a grapple move that suddenly switches to smoothly animated motion-capture quality animation. There’s no fluency in the transitions, and it just makes the game look like a spit-polished Xbox or PS2 game. Newcomers to the series will probably have trouble coming to grips with the awkward control scheme SVR2010 employs, which is built to allow dozens of individual moves to be mapped to each wrestler. It’s a system that takes time to get used to, and one that rewards you if you take the time to learn your favourite wrestlers moves, but if you move to another character you’re playing blind for a while as you work out which moves are mapped to which buttons.
While we’re on the subject of aged features that need an overhaul, the graphics engine would be close to the top of this list. Yukes seem to be still using the engine that drove the Smackdown! games when they were PS2 exclusives back in the early-to-mid 2000’s. It looked great back then, but since then all they appear to have done is give the models a higher polygon count and increase the texture quality. The mouth animations in particular are cringeworthy. Every time you see a cutscene where a wrestler is talking, their lips will flap wildly like a horse eating a carrot, and it just looks really bad. The wrestlers themselves look okay, but if the time was taken to improve them they could look so much better. If you compare the wrestlers in SVR2010 to, say, the boxers in Fight Night Round 4, it’s like comparing a painting to a high-resolution photograph in terms of graphical fidelity.
SVR2010 offers nothing new in the way of gameplay modes this year, but everything you saw last year is back again. All the quick-play modes are here to let you quickly jump into a match type of your choice, and pretty much any interesting match type over the years that you could care to name is here. Career mode lets you go through a year in the life of your chosen wrestler, and as usual it’s only interesting if you do it using a custom created wrestler. The Road To Wrestlemania mode returns again, allowing you to go through a highly scripted story mode in the 90 days leading up to Wrestlemania using a created wrestler, Edge, Mickie James, Shawn Michaels, Randy Orton, or the Brand Warfare angle which puts you in the shoes of multiple characters. The story lines in this mode are reasonably good, by pro-wrestling standards that is. The voice work that drives these story lines however, is absolutely terrible. All the voices are done by the real WWE wrestlers, and are very clearly recorded in a studio. The result is voice work that lacks any shred of the intensity that you’d find if they were yelling it into a microphone in the middle of the ring on Monday Night RAW. The most laughably bad voice work comes on the voicemail messages you get during the Road To Wrestlemania mode, where your rivals will leave you trash-talk messages before your matchup with them. SVR2010 comes with online modes for you to play against friends or randoms over the internet, but this feature may as well have been omitted. The gameplay relies far too heavily on timing, and the netcode is not even close to being good enough to support this. The only thing you should be doing online in this game is sharing things you’ve created.
WWE Smackdown vs Raw 2010 is game that suffers heavily from the typical mindset of an annualised game franchise. There just aren’t enough changes on a year-to-year basis to justify buying the new version every year, or even every two years. And as such, it feels like its stuck in the past. If you’ve never played a SVR game before and you’re a big WWE fan, then it’s definitely worth a look. But even casual fans of the WWE might struggle to have this hold their interest, as the gameplay just isn’t up to the standard you expect from a game being released in 2009. If you’re way into your custom created content, then the story mode editor is definitely a great addition to the series, but whether thats worth shelling out for a full-priced game is questionable. Hopefully the inevitable 2011 iteration of Smackdown vs Raw will give the series the kick into the next generation that it probably should have got back in 2008.
