SmackDown vs. Raw 2008

Rating Teen Genre sports Publisher THQ External Links Official THQ Website

Oh yeah brother! It’s time to get down and dirty as the war between Smackdown, Raw, and ECW rolls to the handheld market on your Nintendo DS! WWE Smackdown vs. Raw 2008 brings forth a new age in your common wrestling games. THQ’s officially licensed touch-screen wrestler comes across as an intriguing novelty. From a design perspective, the game takes things in an entirely different direction than its console counterparts, and the graphics aren’t too shabby either.

Journey into the primetime action as you play over fifteen superstars on the Raw, ECW, and Smackdown rosters. However this time the game takes new shape as now the buttons that you would normally use do absolutely NOTHING. That’s right; this game is completely controlled by your stylus/touchscreen combination. I hope you don’t have carpal tunnel syndrome. You have two options to play: Season or Exhibition. If you chose to go for the WWE World Championship, you are a brave soul. The gameplay wears thin after only a few matches, and the minimalist feature set keeps this from being the next big thing.

The best thing about the Nintendo DS version of this year’s relentless barrage of wrestling releases is how good the game looks. The wrestler models are big and nicely detailed (please note this is by DS standards), and the entrances in particular are well done. The voiceover announce work and theme music do a great job of bringing the flash and pageantry of the typical superstar ring entrance to the small screens. When you do get around to actually wrestling a match, the moves animate quite nicely, though this can be attributed to the game being, essentially, a series of scripted cut-scenes strung together by your actions.

The gameplay is unlike that of any other wrestling game out there. Every match begins with both wrestlers standing in opposite each in the center of the ring, and the action starts to flow from there, sort of. You basically have three move options which I will bring back the classic arcade games and call them your YELLOW (or Weak) attack, ORANGE (medium), and RED (Strong) attacks. These maneuvers each have corresponding stylus controls that need to be made before a strike or grapple can be activated.

To start a move, you’ll click the icon matching the move you want to execute, and follow the guide on-screen. Punches, for instance, are a single swiping movement. A grapple move may have you tap the screen a couple times and then swipe. Submissions require you to spin a dial by drawing circles on the screen, the tighter the better, while powerful moves may require quick rubbing motions to pull off. There’s a decent amount of variety, over eighty combinations to be exact, and you’ll have to think fast to pull of your moves before your opponent reacts and counterattacks.

There is some strategy involved in predicting what moves your opponent will attempt, and in trying to figure out the right sequence of commands to get your desired hold, like a submission or finisher. Sadly, the limited move set makes it so that you’re going to see the same five or six holds executed every match, with little variation to keep the action from getting grossly repetitive. Unless of course you are just playing Exhibition, which then means for every different wrestler you play, you get a whole new move set. Even if the move sets are somewhat simplistic, there’s more depth here than comes across at first glance. The game has a full location damage system, for instance, you’ll have to weaken your opponent’s head in order to ready them for a submission. You’ll also have to build up momentum by nailing multiple moves in succession in order to ready your finishing move, like Shawn Michaels’ Sweet Chin Music or John Cena’s F-U.

While the action of the game’s Season mode takes place within the confines of the squared circle, you’ll spend plenty of time milling about backstage, taking in more of the WWE superstar experience. Essentially this boils down to adventures in petty theft, like sifting through trash cans, searching lockers and gym bags that don’t belong to you, and even checking under sofa cushions. You may never thought that The Undertaker would sink so low, but spending a few minutes every week searching every safe, laundry hamper, pizza box, and file cabinet is the only way to find the game’s precious time tokens. The searching gets very repetitive, but you don’t have to do it if you don’t mind missing out on the much needed stat upgrades. Basically the tokens are used for training time in the gym.

Overall WWE Smackdown vs. Raw 2008 is not necessarily the best wrestling game of the year, but certainly the innovative side of it shows that people are finally thinking about the next generation of gaming. Just like the comedian Nick Swardson says, in the next 20 years we’ll just be beating the crap out of each other and exchanging quarters while giving each other the classic “good game.”