WWF Smackdown Review


For PlayStation

Rating: Good
   WWF Smackdown is a good game that's a little bit too repetitive to be 
great.  For a game that was hyped as the Holy Grail of wrestling games, 
Smackdown has a disappointing amount of glaring flaws.
   The much-hyped Season Mode is a nice touch that adds plenty of depth to 
the game, but it's plagued by three-way matches, four-way matches, and 
knockout finishes.  In most of the matches with more than two participants, 
the first person to score a pinfall, knockout, or submission wins the 
match.  All of the other wrestlers lose despite the fact that they were 
never actually beaten.  THQ should have given these matches elimination 
rules, or at least given the player the choice between the two sets of 
rules.
   The knockout finishes are also very annoying, and there's no way to 
disable them in the Season Mode.  Sometimes after a big move like a 
Tombstone or Pedigree, the victim will supposedly be knocked out and the 
match will be over.  This is only mildly annoying in normal matches because 
you probably would have been pinned anyway after such a big move.  However, 
these completely destroys the balance of the three- and four-way matches.  
If you're playing a multi-player game, it's not a matter of who is the best 
player, it's a matter of who is the first to execute a big move.
   Most of the so-called "story line sequences" in the Season Mode are 
pathetic.  Creating them required the intelligence of a coffee table, or 
worse yet, one of South Park Rally's designers.  Previews of Smackdown in 
recent months have led gamers to believe that the story line sequences add 
drama and intrigue to the game.  In fact, it boils down to crap like, 
"I wonder what Al Snow and Hardcore Holly are talking about" and "Look at 
Mark Henry!  What a competitor!"
   It would be nice if your place in the 32-person Royal Rumble was 
randomly determined rather than always making you come to the ring first.  
Also, the Season Mode's schedule makes no sense.  There is only one event 
per month, and each event seems to be random other than the five big pay-
per-views.  Having a schedule of only twelve matches per year is normally 
reserved for people like Scott Hall.
   Another thing that makes no sense is the way in which you unlock new 
characters.  Every year after Wrestlemania, you're led to believe that you 
have unlocked a new wrestler.  In fact, you haven't.  You have simply 
unlocked the ability to use that wrestler's head in the poorly-done Create 
A Superstar Mode.  If you want to add that wrestler to the game, you have 
to guess what all of their attributes are.
   The rankings in the Season Mode add to the game somehow.  They rank all 
of the wrestlers in order based on points, and you can also check anyone's 
win-loss record at any time.  It's nice that the Season Mode doesn't force 
you to participate in tag team matches like Wrestlemania 2000 does.  
However, it would have been nice if the tag team titles were defended more 
often (instead of once every 1-3 years).
   The first thing I noticed when I started playing this game is that the 
gameplay itself is extremely fluid and smooth.  There is a huge contrast 
between the abrupt, jerky movements of the wrestlers in ECW Hardcore 
Revolution and the realistic, natural movements of the wrestlers in 
Smackdown.  It also makes sense that how quickly you cover your opponent 
after a move effects his or her chances of kicking out.
   There are no crowd chants, instant replays, or color commentators in the 
game.  There is no justifiable reason for the lack of chants and replays, 
but maybe the lack of commentary is a good thing.  Wrestling game 
commentary is usually more annoying than it is effective, so maybe 
excluding it from the game was a smart move by THQ.
   The addition of special guest referees is a cool innovation.  Smackdown 
also has a good interface that is never confusing, and it lets you do what 
you want to do in a logical order.  The auto-load and auto-save features 
are welcome and convenient additions.
   Many of the things this game has going for it are counter-acted by flaws 
in the same area.  The varying sizes of the wrestlers, the speed of the 
game, and the Full Motion Video entrance movies all had the potential to 
add to the overall experience of the game, but they all fell short in 
different ways.
   It's nice that the in-game character models are different sizes 
depending on the real-life sizes of each wrestler, but this causes a new 
problem for every one that it fixes.  For example, when The Big Show does 
his choke-slam, he sticks his hand where most of the wrestlers' throats are 
based on the average height of the wrestlers in the game.  If he's going 
against a short opponent and does the choke-slam, he actually appears to be 
grabbing the air above the wrestler's head as he choke-slams them.
   It's nice that Smackdown isn't painfully slow like some wrestling games, 
but it's almost too fast for its own good.  It's not too fast in the sense 
that you can't process everything that's going on; it's too fast in the 
sense that wrestlers don't do enough selling.  Getting up immediately after 
most moves would get you fired in the real WWF, but the wrestlers in this 
game do it with reckless abandon.  Also, there is no consistency to the 
selling.  Sometimes a wrestler will be knocked silly by a simple hip-toss, 
and the next minute they will get up right away after a top-rope 
huracanrana.
   It's nice that all of the wrestlers have FMV entrance movies, but why 
do they walk in place for several seconds during their entrances rather 
than actually moving towards the ring?  The entrance music and the in-game 
music go hand-in-hand.  You can't have one of them on and the other off.  
It feels somehow un-natural to listen to music during a wrestling match, 
but turning off the music results in silent entrances.
   The instruction manual is one of the worst ever produced for any game.  
It explains everything very vaguely, or in some cases, not at all.  It 
doesn't even tell you how to do such basic things as climb a cage or pick 
up a weapon.  
   Just as conspicuous as the oversights in the instruction manual are the 
oversights in the game's selection of wrestlers.  There's no excuse for 
Tazz, Kurt Angle, Rikishi, and Too Cool to be missing from the game.  In 
Tazz's case, he didn't debut in the WWF until January, but they knew he was 
coming in September.  That gave THQ six months to add him to the game, but 
apparently that's too "last-minute" for them.
   Smackdown features a lot less moves than Wrestlemania 2000, making it a 
much more repetitive game.  Each character has only four main grapple moves, 
and there's nothing to stop you from doing the same couple of moves over 
and over again.  The only thing stopping you from winning a match with 20 
atomic drops is your own desire to try something else.  Needless to say, 
it's frustrating when you choose not to take the easy way out and then end 
up losing the match for your trouble.
   The "strong grapple moves" can only be executed when your opponent is 
dizzy, which is a rare occurrence.  Wrestlemania 2000 has a much smarter 
system of making you hold down the grapple button for several seconds in 
order to do a strong grapple.  The flow of the matches in Smackdown is 
ruined by the fact that they can (and often do) end out of nowhere, with no 
sense of drama or tension building up before the finish.
   Despite all of its flaws, WWF Smackdown manages to be very entertaining 
and somewhat addictive.  What would really be awesome is a wrestling game 
that combines Wrestlemania 2000's grapple system and variety of moves with 
all of the new things that Smackdown brings to the table.  Until that game 
is released, Wrestlemania 2000 is still the best overall wrestling game on 
the market in my opinion.  Regardless of how it compares to Wrestlemania, 
there's no doubt that Smackdown is the best wrestling game on the 
PlayStation by far.

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