NIDZUMI+

The world of wrestling seems to be in a rut at the moment. On one side you’ve got a young upstart company that are still learning by their plenty amount of mistakes they make and on the other side you’ve got the long-standing WWE. The problem is that wrestling isn’t booming like it did a decade ago and unfortunately this has translated into the games. TNA Impact made it’s debut on the scene with some interesting ideas but nothing to really back it up meanwhile WWE Smackdown always sounds a lot better on paper than the actual result. It seems that every year they fix major issues while inadvertently causing new ones to appear. Will this be the year that the series starts to peak again?

This year’s ‘main event’ is the Road to Wrestlemania Mode that has you playing as one of seven wrestlers on show as they make their way to the grandest stage of them all, Wrestlemania. Each wrestler has their own set story that matches either own character and personality. For example in Jericho’s story he gets followed by someone posting terminate_jericho videos that are a direct relation to how Jerchio returned last year. It proves to be a great idea with brilliantly good stories and although they aren’t delivered in the best way due to some bad animations and voice-work in the cut scenes, the mode is still worth going through especially when each story will take you about two hours to play through.

Meanwhile the standard career mode is still featured but it feels more like a way of building up stats instead of a standalone mode. You can select a pre-made wrestler or create your own in the excellently dense create a superstar mode. You can then challenge for numerous titles by beating wrestlers to make your way up the rankings. The truth is this isn’t the same story based career mode you’ve played in previous games but it definitely has more for you to do even if you might not want to do it all.

The aforementioned create a superstar mode is a brilliant showcase for how in-depth the series gets. This time there is a new create a finisher mode that although can be used simply to make incredibly long and ridiculous moves, it can also be used to make nearly any move you could think of. This year also features a mode called Highlight Reel and this is basically a replay editor that can be used to create long movies of your saved in-game clips. In theory it’s a brilliant idea but in practice it takes too long to load and cut together a decent movie although we can see a logical step in letting you use your videos as your character’s entrance video being added next year.

Tag teams are a big feature of this years rendition which sees the standard mode having more double team moves including finishers and an interesting hot tag system. Hot tags are basically when a wrestler is down for a long period of the match until he then some how manages to get that tag for his partner to come in all hyped up. It would make a lot more sense if the game was more scripted but they’ve tried to include a scripted event in a game that is pretending to be real so it doesn’t well quite as well as it should. Actually the chances are that you’ll play through loads of tag matches and you’ll never see a hot tag once.

The game also has a whole plethora of matches and like previous versions we’ve picked up a few new ones along the way. The key one this year is the Inferno Match which basically sets alight to the edges of the ring and the winner is the first person to set their opponent on fire. It works fine but the way you cast wrestlers into the flames is really slow and seems to be more about persistence instead of skill. Nevertheless the match type is interesting and has a lot of context sensitive actions you can use which undoubtedly is when the game is at it’s best.

In what is the tenth Smackdown game you start to feel that the game needs a drastic overhaul. Despite all the new additions, some modes some how seem lacklustre. RTWM is a brilliant mode that showcases why people watch wrestling but the career mode is incredibly weak and when the career mode has been the standout mode in previous versions it only makes you think we are going around in circles. Despite that the core of the game is probably the best it’s been for a long while and if your a fan of the series you won’t be disappointed.