One of my favourite areas of this game, and definitely the most entertaining is the Environmental Hotspots in and outside the ring. These mini interactive cut scenes really capture the full bloodiness of a fight, and moving your analogue stick up and down to mimic your wrestler slamming a fellow colleagues head against a steel turnbuckle is superb fun. The outside of the ring is littered with ‘foreign objects’ which you can pick up and use as a weapon, just make sure the referee isn’t looking or is knocked out. Should you ‘accidentally’ knock the ref out and take the fight to the outside, expect the traditional chairs, sledgehammers, and barbed wire sticks to lurk under the ring.
You can also now take the fight to the crowd itself. This is even more dangerous as the area is littered with even more lethal objects. Fire Extinguishers, metal bins, tables are all available, as well as various objects you can grab off fans to utilise against your opponent. Expect a lot of blood… THQ have to be commended for the way they’ve brought to life some of the more entertaining aspects of this sport because some of these outside ring battles can last ages especially if DQ’s are disabled so the ref cannot intervene.
Advanced Smackdown players will opt straight away for the Create a Wrestler mode to either re-create old superstars not featured in the game, or to create a look-a-like wrestler of themselves. You can heavily customise your fighter not only with clothing or his body itself but his/her repertoire of wrestling moves too. I ended up opting for the Goldberg style Spear for my fighters finishing move. I maxed out my wrestler’s stats and he then had a rating of 99.
I did take a peek at Create an Entrance, but I didn’t have 2hrs to spare. It was extremely detailed, and also looked quite complicated too. However, given that one of my chief complaints of this game is loading screens, the last thing I wish to see is another one, so I can’t see myself even using this at all.
Visuals/Audio
The visuals are superb, way better then the previous instalments by a long shot. Every superstar model looks fantastic. Although some of the models are a bit inaccurate because a few of the older superstars are too muscular in appearance. Ric Flair for instance is one of the oldest fighters in the wrestling today, who must be in his mid 60’s? This man has abs in the game for crying out loud when in real life he’s flabby! All the models realistically have sweat accumulating on their bodies during the course of the match as well as blood if you injure a fighter’s face heavily. Matches can end up in a major blood fest too.
Presentation for this title is top notch, one of the best I’ve seen, and it does make me question what kind of production values this game had. Ring entrances are superb with pyrotechnics, light fade outs superbly recreated. Seeing The Undertaker or DX’s entrance is a stunning sight. Upon doing a wrestlers finisher or dragging a fighter to one of the many hotspots inside and outside the ring, the camera will switch in for a close up view where you can see your efforts up close and personal. For example, grappling a wrestler near the steel steps and dragging him to it will initiate a camera cut of you interactively slamming his head against the steps. Looks great, and works perfectly.
My only disappointment would have to be at the sheer amount of loading screens that are present in the game. There must be some seriously large amounts of data being processed because loading screens are all over the place. True that the graphics in the game are extremely detailed and very complex but ease up on the loading screens THQ!
Just to show you how seriously annoying the situation is, let’s mock up a single player match scenario. Choose a single player game, and then pick the two fighters, and then progress to the match….Up pops a loading screen and you wait for approx 20secs, then the game plays your fighters entrance movie, click a button to skip this and then you’re back at another 20sec loading screen for your opponent’s entrance movie. Press a button to skip that and then up pops yet another loading screen with some in game tips being displayed – probably to stop the gamer from passing out at this stage. Then finally you get to press ‘A’ to begin the match. All in all, from the point of choosing your match type and superstars, a game will take roughly just over a minute to initiate before you can play. Now once again this either due to a large amount of data being processed causing these lengthy data accesses or just poor coding. I’d go for the latter in this case given that almost all Smackdown games in the past have all had long loading times, but why THQ? Getting into a game can be speeded up by disabling ‘Entrances’ in the options menu though, but that still doesn’t negate the fact that the game as a whole has too many loading screens.