Every year the event wrestling fans get most excited about is the annual extravaganza, Wrestlemania. But there's another spot on the calendar that many wrestling fans get very excited about, and that's the release of the year's Smackdown vs Raw title. The series has followed an odd trajectory of peaks and dips; improving visually but suffering failings in gameplay, then improving the gameplay but pairing that with a poor roster and feature set. There’s also the curse of apathy and blandness that can and does take hold of annual titles.

But Smackdown vs Raw 2010 is a bit different. It's the biggest peak the series has had for some time, for starters. So let's get straight into the new aspects of the series that make 2010 a five star match and not a toilet break dud.

One of the big improvements that came to the 2009 game was the ability to fine tune the roster; allowing you to mess with whether wrestlers were face or heel (good or bad), what show they were on, what titles they held and what allegiances they might have had. It could all be done pretty much from the same screen, making shaping your take on the WWE world very convenient. 2010 sensibly retains this, of course, but it also adds two significant features which make it even easier to shape the game into what you want it to be. The first is a simple enough premise; you can now, in addition to making your own wrestlers (known as a Create-A-Wrestler, or CAW), download wrestlers made by others. This is a long overdue feature, so it's nice to finally be able to download wrestlers made by those more talented than us with ease, rather than printing out extensive and complex formulas which take an hour to input and still not look right in the end.

 

The crown jewel of the game is the Story Designer mode. Most wrestling fans have at some stage been convinced they could do a better job than the current TV writers (and in all honesty, it wouldn't be hard), come up with their own booking scenarios and feuds and storylines. Story Designer lets you, in a slightly obtuse and roundabout way, create those storylines. Not only that, you can upload them for other people to download and play. This essentially gives players a virtually infinite source of new single-player story content. Combined with the ability to download CAWs, it gives 2010 a huge edge over previous games in the series.

TELL ME A TALE
So let's look a little deeper into the Story Designer mode. The numbers range from hyper impressive to quite poor. For example, your storyline can literally run for a year's worth of shows, with up to 450 matches and 50 cut-scene scenarios in one story. So no matter how ambitious or lengthy your proposed story might be, you've got plenty of room to spin it out. Of course, you are limited by the finite number of different insertable cut-scenes, but you can insert whatever text you like to vary the context. The only issue with Story Designer is the fact that you're limited to having a mere ten appearances for CAWs. This doesn’t mean you can only have ten create-a-wrestlers, but that over the 500 maximum segments at your creative disposal, a create-a-wrestler can only take part in ten of them. This seems rather ridiculous and I can't fathom the reason that this restriction is in place. It certainly dampens the potential of an otherwise fantastic mode that will keep wrestling fans very busy creating new storylines and playing the storylines of others.
 

"You stole my budgie smugglers!"

I MISS THE ROCK
The other tweaks that have been made to the game improve rather than detract. The HUD has been stripped right back in favour of a more television-style presentation, with a simple ring at the bottom of each wrestler's feet your main indication as to what's happening. The Create-A-Finisher mode still operates in much the same way, but you're now also able to create aerial finishers. Making a guy flip fifteen times in the air in fifteen different directions is pretty fun, though it kind of breaks the game's collision detection.

The game also takes a leaf out of the Guitar Hero 5 book in that when you boot up the game, you're thrown directly into 'training' gameplay, from which you can bring up the menu at your leisure. This is a slightly redundant feature once you've learned the initial adjustments to the controls, but you can change both of the wrestlers and your opponent's state. If there's a wrestler you particularly dislike it's kind of cool to begin each gameplay session wailing on them for a bit before you bring up the menus.

Needs more purple

ROYAL GRUMBLE
The roster is bigger and much more up to date than the 08 or 09 iterations. The Royal Rumble has again been retooled, but it's unfortunate they didn't go in a direction similar to this year's earlier title, Legends of Wrestlemania. Instead, you have a choice between three contextual mini-games. Two involve frantic button mashing, the other requires that you simply press the buttons that flash up on the screen, meaning you'll always try and dispatch opponents with that method rather than put your poor thumbs through more suffering.

2010 is definitely the best in the series so far and will give fans disappointed by the last couple of titles some hope that the series is heading in the right direction. It's the closest videogame portrayal yet of televised WWE and boasts enough content to keep fans very satisfied until the inevitable 2011 game.