Release Date: 11/13/07

The Game

I used to be into professional wrestling. However, within the last decade or so, it’s gotten to be quite stale. I was a fan of the WWE (formerly known as the WWF) and it’s 90’s attitude era where stars like Stone Cold Steve Austin, Shawn Michaels, The Rock, and Triple X ran the show. Unfortunately, many of these guys are still around, just a little bit older and a little slower. The same could be said for the wrestling genre in the video game world. While I’ve heard many great things about the glory days of the N64’s wrestling titles, I’ve never actually played them, only hearing stories about how great the controls were even if the graphics weren’t quite beautiful. Now released for the Nintendo Wii, SmackDown vs. Raw 2008 attempts to bring wrestling into the next generation of video gaming with a new control scheme.

The game itself is nothing new. You get the rosters of WWE’s Raw and Smackdown including the likes of The Undertaker, Triple H, Randy Orton, and a whole mess of other wrestlers. However, things get quickly sour as there are actually less wrestlers available than in last year’s installment. Fortunately, things get spiced up a bit with a nice create-a-wrestler mode, which is key for any wrestling game. There are also 5 modes that include single-player, tag, hardcore, triple-threat, and K.O. Now I’ve played a fair share of wrestling games, but what happened to royal rumbles, hell in the cells, backstage brawls, and table matches? Making matters worse is that the provided modes here are quite lackluster with the hardcore match only including chairs as weapons. Sorry, but is it 1985 again?

Gameplay

Now onto arguably the most important aspect of any wrestler: the controls. Now, with the Nintendo Wii, we’ve been graced with a whole new set of controls. While recent traditional button schemes may not have come close to recreating the glory days of N64 wrestling titles, the Wii come nowhere close. Sure these motion-activated controls are supposed to broaden the game’s appeal to a wider audience, but this simply doesn’t work on any level. What sounds like a great idea on paper is poorly executed as the controls are not exactly responsive. Grappling, punching, and finishing moves are not quite balanced as the motions quickly become repetitive. What makes things worse is that because you’re wildly flailing your arms about, don’t expect too many matches in a row unless you’re going to learn how to limit your movements, taking you out of the experience even more if you haven’t already felt detached enough.

All things considered, SmackDown vs. Raw 2008 for the Wii feels like a port where the motion controls are in place of button pushing. As the inaugural title for the series on the console, it’s to be expected, but really, do you want to be paying 50 smackers for a prototype of game with a less than desirable control scheme that should have been tested a bit more? Indeed it is a trend with this first generation of games on the Wii, but I wouldn’t pay to be a guinea pig.

Graphics

Here’s a portion of the game that fares pretty the decently. The much maligned console with the so-called underpowered processor manages to churn out a very nice looking. The character models look sharp with plenty of detail. The entrances are also a thing of beauty as do the in-game graphics. Animations are also fairly smooth, but the age old clipping issues do rear their ugly heads. However, clipping issues have plagued wrestling games since day one, so you can’t hold it against the Wii version of the game.

Sound

Much like the graphics department, the audio department fares well with decent sounding music, in-game play by play, and voice-overs. Unfortunately, as nice as everything sounds, you probably will turn down the volume and listen to something else while you play. Most of the time is spent with in-ring commentary where the announcers repeat themselves quite often. And if they’re not repeating themselves, well, they’re saying nonsensical things unrelated to the action going on with the match itself.

Lasting Appeal

The single player Main Event Mode should potentially keep players wrestling for quite some time. However, chances are you’ll stop playing soon as the repetition of game play will soon become boring. The basic gist of the game follows your wrestler starting off at the bottom and slowly, and I mean slowly, working his way up the ladder, fighting the same wrestlers over and over again until enough credibility and rep is built up to fight another three wrestlers for a while. This is supposed to be a story mode found in basically every other wrestling game, but it’s far from an intriguing story.

Combine this with a lack of online play, and you’re basically left with a wrestling game that will only keep you entertained as long as you can handle the boredom from playing alone or sucker some friends into a frustrating match of unresponsive wrestling.

Final Thoughts

The game looks and sounds very nice. Unfortunately, SmackDown vs. Raw 2008 for the Nintendo Wii suffers from the same problem that plagues every other wrestling game made since 2000: lack of controls. Sure, the new control scheme is interesting at first, but really, the simplification of controls and game as whole dumbed things down a bit too far for the wrestling fan while nonfans will probably become bored just as quickly. With all that said, this is a nice first step, but there is plenty of more progress to be had before any Wii wrestling game becomes a fixture in the genre. This is a rental at best until the game itself gets a little polish and fine tuning.

- Morris Tang