SmackDown! Vs. RAW Review for PS2 from 1UP.com (original) (raw)
REVIEW
(PS2)
Yeah, there's some pain coming.
If you love the WWE, this is your game. If you love pro wrestling...well, then it's going to be a tougher decision. Now that Yuke's has a monopoly on PS2 wrestling, the prospects for evolution in grappling gameplay aren't so bright.
The season mode in SmackDown! vs. RAW still destroys any competition. It's an almost seamless simulation of the TV product—the angles are simple, and there are occasional gaps in logic, but at least they don't involve corpses or the birth of plastic hands. While THQ's experiment with spoken dialogue this year fails—the acting is frequently passable, but the mixing and lip-synch are absolutely terrible—what was good in last year's Here Comes the Pain is still solid during a season and in the ridiculously versatile wrestler edit mode.
Everything else about SmackDown!, though, is wearing out its welcome. In the ring, inconsistencies abound—weird collision detection, neutered submission moves, and A.I. that switches between being timid and simply schizoid. The new Def Jam may have had brutally difficult opponents, but at least they were consistently logically challenging. In a Yuke's game, logic sometimes takes the night off.
That takes some of the shine away from a huge selection of match modes and the new addition of online multiplayer (the online mode is pretty bare, only allowing single matches, but it's a step in an interesting direction). Given the absence of any real competition in this genre, it also doesn't inspire a lot of hope for the future.
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