I was surprised by the wealth of game modes on offer. With your typical versus and Tag Teams right though to the more mental matches like TLC (that's: tables, ladders and chairs) and Hardcore. Other game modes are Cage, Table, Street Fight, Ladder, Battle Royal and Hell In A Cell. All of these can be played with a multitude of combinations like one on one, Triple Threat, Fatal Four Way, Armageddon, 2 versus 2 with managers and loads more. With Royal Rumble and season modes having their own separate menu.

   

I was extremely surprised by the 'create a wrestler' option, because there's an absolute ton of stuff to choose and change. There are 8 pages of items to use for almost every part of the body (e.g. head and legs). I made an extremely tall guy called 'The Angry Ref' with boxing gloves and a huge hat. But the impressive selection of clothing and items isn't the most surprising part, its the amazing amount of detail you can add to your wrestlers entrance. You can change the stage lighting, smoke effects, the amount of pyrotechnics and camera flashes. You can even create your own video (it's pretty limited though), I made one all 'staticy' saying Angry Ref with my wrestler doing a muscle poses in the background, also you can change the music even using music from your Xbox hard drive, which is an awesome feature. AND you can pick from a whole list of names and words that the announcer calls out at the start (mine was something like 'The Alien D-pad Rodrigase' - So, So cool.

The wrestlers look awesome, all of them are smooth and shiny which gives Raw 2 a really realistic feel. When the wrestlers come up before a match I blinked and thought I was watching Raw on Sky because the likeness' are uncanny. There's also a 3D wildly animated crowd. A friend and me played a hardcore match with four other wrestlers and a ref with twenty-something weapons in the ring and there wasn't any slowdown at all. The sound is also really good with all the features you'd expect from a modern wrestling game like all of the individual character music. There is no commentary or dialogue though, which is a bit of a bummer.

   

So how does the game actually play? Well this is a bit of mixed bag really. It's slower than Smackdown, which feels strange; it's like watching them fight underwater or something. But once you get used to the game's lack of speed it's actually pretty good fun. We were playing for hours, and one of us doesn't even like wrestling at all! So the actual wrestling part of the game is good, but the season mode is an odd one, it's a year before Wrestlemania comes around and a month until before you do a Smackdown, one Raw and a pay per view event. Before each show you have a list of the events for that night, and you can choose to rest while that match is going on, or you can ambush someone or interfere in a match. It's a really cool idea. But when you go ambush someone there's no dialogue or even text to read - you just see the wrestler's mouths moving. Also there are no particular storylines, you just choose what matches you do to obtain popularity.

So overall I'm not the biggest fan of wrestling, but I think this is one mainly for big wrestling fans, where as the PS2 Smackdown games are for the casual gamer as well. It's really fun in multiplayer and apart from the lack of dialogue and text speech from the story mode it's pretty cool.