Be Excellent To Each Other

I feel a bit ashamed to admit it but I think I really like it. It has so much wrong with it though.

The graphics, though quite detailed in many ways, look so horribly shiny and plasticy. The background scenery is basic to say the least.

The animation is often fudged and entirely skipped via a camera angle change.

It takes around 10 seconds to change menus.

The controls are utterly absurd. There's about 15 million moves you can do and seemingly not one of them is 'run toward opponent'.

And yet it's been in my 360 exclusively over the past week. Why could that be? Simple really. The objectives they've added. Being as it's based around recreating matches of the past you have certain objectives to complete within a match. Some involve triggering a cut scene, others just simply require a move to be repeated a few times. But it's this which makes it utterly compulsive. It makes it more of a proper simulation of wrestling than any other game ever. You actually get to take part in a scripted match. In Smackdown you've only ever had one objective, which is win.

The taunt system is interesting as well. Instead of doing the typical thing of increasing your spirit, you have about five taunts which perform certain functions. One speeds you up, one recovers 25% health, one makes you stronger, one prevents the opponent from reversing moves and another one makes you get up instantly if knocked down (I think). Performing one reduces your spirit by an entire level.

Sadly there's no female characters and you can't create a female character either. It's also possible that there's only about 7 preset matches available. Not entirely sure about that yet. There's just a list of old wrestlemania main events to go through and I suspect nothing other than matches you create after that.

It's the most fun I've had in a wrestling game since No Mercy on 64 (which still holds supreme for me) and features things which would be really nice to have in a new smackdown game.

Does it force to you to recreate WMVII, where you drop a thousand elbows on Ultimate Warrior, only for him to kick out and knack you with one wack gorilla press?

You always play as the winner anyway. But that sort of thing can happen if you're not careful.

I noticed the price of this has been reduced in Gamestation but what puts me off most modern wrestling games are the load times and the unskippable intros you get in some of them. How's this game for those?

You get intros but they're quite skippable. There's about 10-20 seconds loading pre match then the intros start. Each one will take about a second to skip. You only get two for the most part obviously.

That review still tilts me ultra-hard... you can't say "you either love wrestling or you hate it" and then say in the very next sentence "me, I think it's ok"

You've either missed the joke or you're pretending to have missed the joke.

Either way, you're a cock.

Aren't jokes supposed to be funny?

Not our particular 'brand' of 'humour', no.

Actually, I did get it, but a casual reader wouldn't because it is right at the start of the review and you haven't established your style of humour to them yet, so my criticism still stands

Stop complaining! It was a free review. You can't complain if something's free, eh Meaty?

But you forced me to read it, what's "free" about that?


I dun geddit