I’d hoped that this years’s WWE SmackDown vs. Raw for the Nintendo DS would improve on last year’s game, which played more like some kind of turn-based RPG than a traditional all-action wrestling game. You could pick your attack and then watch the wrestlers perform the move you’d commanded – or not, as the case often tended to be.
Okay so this year developer’s TOSE have tried something new, something that should feel more like it was designed with the DS in mind, and... well let me explain. You use the touch screen and D-Pad to move your wrestler and tapping the opponent with the stylus executes a basic attack. Drawing a circle initiates a grapple, or double circle encourages a stronger grapple - although you’d be hard-stretched to notice the difference. The problems with this system immediately start to rear their ugly heads as you got through the tutorials. It just doesn’t seem responsive enough and often there’s no indication that your wrestler has accepted the command, sometimes it'll take a couple of seconds before the character moves, and you'll find yourself frantically drawing circles and tapping the opposing wrestler in the faint hope that your guy will at least show some sign of life. This may be intended to be an instant action game but often the reaction time is hopelessly slow. The movement of the wrestler is also sluggish regardless of their physique, and reminded me of the WWF games of old, and I’m talking about original PlayStation-era vintage.
Perhaps understandably for a handlheld game the choice of moves is also extremely limited, meaning that at least you won’t have to learn a whole lot of button combinations. All moves use no more than the D-Pad, the stylus and the L-Button. I can’t help thinking that although this is a worthy attempt at making the game authentically "DS-ey", the game would have played a lot better with more moves and combinations mapped to the A, B, X and Y buttons and traditional movement controlled via the D-pad, because this just doesn’t work, and most importantly makes the bouts feel drawn out.
You can strike, grapple, Irish whip, use weapons and all, but it’s all so sluggish and unintuitive that you’ll be hard pressed to win a fight, let alone complete an entire season. If you do soldier on and learn the kinks of the control system (I did eventually manage to win a few bouts) then - as with the home console versions - you can create-a-superstar and edit everything from eye colour to entrance music and what kind of body paint you want them to wear.
WWE Smackdown Vs Raw 2009 Featuring ECW (to give it its full, catchy title) is a good looking and sounding game. It’s colourful, noisy, faithful to the subject matter and has 20-something characters and 17 arenas to unlock. It has 7 different match types including Last Man Standing, Steel Cage, Hardcore and TLC (Tables, Ladders & Chairs). The trouble is that it’s so badly shackled by its limited movements and sluggish controls that going to a real WWE event and poking the real Triple H or The Undertaker with your stylus whilst shouting commands at them would almost certainly get a swifter response. I recommend the latter; it’d be a lot more fun.
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