Video Game Review Guest Editorial
By Chad Hogan, Torch reader

On Tuesday, October 20, WWE Smackdown vs. RAW 2010 was released on store shelves. I trekked to Walmart to grab an Xbox 360 copy, and this is my review.

The first features you will notice are the sheer amount of game modes to choose from. The bread-and-butter of Smackdown has always been its career/story modes. This year, it comes in two forms: Road to WrestleMania and Career Mode.

RtW lets you choose from a list of pre-set Superstars, including Shawn Michaels, Randy Orton, and John Cena, and even your own created Superstar.

The storylines of each Superstar come into play during RtW, including fully voiced cut scenes that will feel right at home with anyone who's watched WWE programming. Each Superstar's story is unique to them, which is why RtW offers only a limited amount of superstars to follow, rather than Smackdown's usual Story modes which allow you to choose anyone but follows a generic linear path.

I like how RtW slims down the amount of players to choose from in favor of differentiating storylines. Plus, this mode is where you unlock a good portion of Trophies/Achievements. RtW also has "roadblocks," or challenges during the match which must be completed It wil inform you on what challenges you need to do during the loading screen. For example, as Shawn Michaels, one of the challenges during my caged title match on Raw was to jump off the top of the cage. Simple, yet challenging to pull off. The roadblocks never feel too challenging, and they always make sense in the context of the match.

On the downside, sometimes a cut scene will pop up and then it's your turn to play out the action, such as an interview gone bad. Times like these aren't very clear on what you have to do, and I was stuck beating down my enemies for 20 minutes before I realized I had to use my finisher on them enough to K.O. them, but only with a finisher. How was I supposed to know?

These moments don't happen too often, and a quick search on Google can always remedy the problem.

As for the Career mode, although you can use any Superstar, it's best to use a created one to unlock the Achievement/Trophy for leveling your created Superstar enough. Otherwise, there isn't really a reason to play this mode, and it really only serves as a title contention between brackets, just like WCW Mayhem's main mode in 1999.

The other main modes include Online play for up to four players (which was lag-free for my matches), as well as Create-a-Superstar, Finisher, Highlight Reel, and Story.

The Create modes are all well done, and are all quick-to-learn, but hard to master. You can upload your creations online, as well as download them. I downloaded the Joker from Dark Night, and he looked amazing. Lots of cool creations here.

The stories are the real star of this game. Although there is no voice acting, you can type in whatever you want, and have whoever say it through text. My best storyline was about ten segments long (I'm not sure how big the segment cap is but it went over ten for me), and I had Shad Gaspard and Mark Henry as the commentators. They hinted at taking the spot from J.R. and King, and later on in my story I had J.R. walking down the parking lot until a car ran him over, just like Austin's storyline before his neck surgery. My story had King's text-over saying he was caught peeping on the Divas, as J.R. muttered to himself.

Of course, that's just my experience creating it, which was very reminiscent of the Create-a-Superstar mode but only a bit deeper and a lot longer to use. If you have the patience, you can make some good, funny stuff, with matches optional.

One of the created stories I downloaded was called TNA vs. WWE. The player created a perfect rendition of Homicide, who came out at the opening of Raw (complete with pyro). The story revealed more TNA wrestlers with takeover intentions. I won't go into detail, but suffice to say, any wrestling fan owes it to themselves to check out these user-made storylines.

SvR 2010 looks phenomenal, with the least amount of clipping I've seen yet in a wrestling game. The Superstars's hair also flows nicely, as does the frame rate, clocking in at 60 fps. The main sections of the crowds are all fully three-dimensional, and they go back pretty deep.

The character models sport a high number of polygon counts, and using the Create-a-Superstar mode, you can get pretty detailed. Pretty much any Superstar can be re-created, and your imagination can come up with clever ways to make movie stars, such as Joker. I've also seen very detailed renditions of Mario and Spiderman.

Also worth noting is the pyro and special effects do not slow down the frame rate. I could still be stuck in 2003, but I don't remember the last time a Smackdown game was 100 percent smooth. I'm including online play as well.

The interface uses a HUD under your Superstar that shows your momentum, and the higher the momentum, the better, as it lets you pull off a finisher. Gone are the on-screen health meters, and I personally think this gives SVR 2010 a much more realistic, WWE-like feel. The presentation is phenomenal, and I honestly wouldn't be surprised if you showed a friend the television set without them knowing, and they thought you were actually watching WWE.

Michael Cole and King do the Raw announcing, with Todd Grisham and J.R. doing Smackdown's announcing. Tony Chimel and Lilian Garcia's voices are lent as the ring announcers, and aside from some awkward-sounding names being called ("Ladies and gentleman...Kane?!), it adds to the WWE-feel. The announcing is repeated but there's plenty of voice over-work in the game so it never feels stale, plus in Road to WrestleMania, the announcing is given greater depth due to the more scripted nature of the storylines (they can talk about things you did "last week," for example).

Overall, I give SvR 2010 4.5/5 stars on the PWTorch scale. The small things, like the (expected) loading, weird announcing (sometimes), and unknown objectives that occasionally pop up in the story modes hold it back from full perfection, but as it stands, this may be the best wrestling game since No Mercy, and any wrestling fan knows No Mercy was the end-all be-all of Wrestling games. Well done Yukes.

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