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Rating: Good WWF Smackdown is a good game that's a little bit too repetitive to be great. For a game that was hyped as the Holy Grail of wrestling games, Smackdown has a disappointing amount of glaring flaws. The much-hyped Season Mode is a nice touch that adds plenty of depth to the game, but it's plagued by three-way matches, four-way matches, and knockout finishes. In most of the matches with more than two participants, the first person to score a pinfall, knockout, or submission wins the match. All of the other wrestlers lose despite the fact that they were never actually beaten. THQ should have given these matches elimination rules, or at least given the player the choice between the two sets of rules. The knockout finishes are also very annoying, and there's no way to disable them in the Season Mode. Sometimes after a big move like a Tombstone or Pedigree, the victim will supposedly be knocked out and the match will be over. This is only mildly annoying in normal matches because you probably would have been pinned anyway after such a big move. However, these completely destroys the balance of the three- and four-way matches. If you're playing a multi-player game, it's not a matter of who is the best player, it's a matter of who is the first to execute a big move. Most of the so-called "story line sequences" in the Season Mode are pathetic. Creating them required the intelligence of a coffee table, or worse yet, one of South Park Rally's designers. Previews of Smackdown in recent months have led gamers to believe that the story line sequences add drama and intrigue to the game. In fact, it boils down to crap like, "I wonder what Al Snow and Hardcore Holly are talking about" and "Look at Mark Henry! What a competitor!" It would be nice if your place in the 32-person Royal Rumble was randomly determined rather than always making you come to the ring first. Also, the Season Mode's schedule makes no sense. There is only one event per month, and each event seems to be random other than the five big pay- per-views. Having a schedule of only twelve matches per year is normally reserved for people like Scott Hall. Another thing that makes no sense is the way in which you unlock new characters. Every year after Wrestlemania, you're led to believe that you have unlocked a new wrestler. In fact, you haven't. You have simply unlocked the ability to use that wrestler's head in the poorly-done Create A Superstar Mode. If you want to add that wrestler to the game, you have to guess what all of their attributes are. The rankings in the Season Mode add to the game somehow. They rank all of the wrestlers in order based on points, and you can also check anyone's win-loss record at any time. It's nice that the Season Mode doesn't force you to participate in tag team matches like Wrestlemania 2000 does. However, it would have been nice if the tag team titles were defended more often (instead of once every 1-3 years). The first thing I noticed when I started playing this game is that the gameplay itself is extremely fluid and smooth. There is a huge contrast between the abrupt, jerky movements of the wrestlers in ECW Hardcore Revolution and the realistic, natural movements of the wrestlers in Smackdown. It also makes sense that how quickly you cover your opponent after a move effects his or her chances of kicking out. There are no crowd chants, instant replays, or color commentators in the game. There is no justifiable reason for the lack of chants and replays, but maybe the lack of commentary is a good thing. Wrestling game commentary is usually more annoying than it is effective, so maybe excluding it from the game was a smart move by THQ. The addition of special guest referees is a cool innovation. Smackdown also has a good interface that is never confusing, and it lets you do what you want to do in a logical order. The auto-load and auto-save features are welcome and convenient additions. Many of the things this game has going for it are counter-acted by flaws in the same area. The varying sizes of the wrestlers, the speed of the game, and the Full Motion Video entrance movies all had the potential to add to the overall experience of the game, but they all fell short in different ways. It's nice that the in-game character models are different sizes depending on the real-life sizes of each wrestler, but this causes a new problem for every one that it fixes. For example, when The Big Show does his choke-slam, he sticks his hand where most of the wrestlers' throats are based on the average height of the wrestlers in the game. If he's going against a short opponent and does the choke-slam, he actually appears to be grabbing the air above the wrestler's head as he choke-slams them. It's nice that Smackdown isn't painfully slow like some wrestling games, but it's almost too fast for its own good. It's not too fast in the sense that you can't process everything that's going on; it's too fast in the sense that wrestlers don't do enough selling. Getting up immediately after most moves would get you fired in the real WWF, but the wrestlers in this game do it with reckless abandon. Also, there is no consistency to the selling. Sometimes a wrestler will be knocked silly by a simple hip-toss, and the next minute they will get up right away after a top-rope huracanrana. It's nice that all of the wrestlers have FMV entrance movies, but why do they walk in place for several seconds during their entrances rather than actually moving towards the ring? The entrance music and the in-game music go hand-in-hand. You can't have one of them on and the other off. It feels somehow un-natural to listen to music during a wrestling match, but turning off the music results in silent entrances. The instruction manual is one of the worst ever produced for any game. It explains everything very vaguely, or in some cases, not at all. It doesn't even tell you how to do such basic things as climb a cage or pick up a weapon. Just as conspicuous as the oversights in the instruction manual are the oversights in the game's selection of wrestlers. There's no excuse for Tazz, Kurt Angle, Rikishi, and Too Cool to be missing from the game. In Tazz's case, he didn't debut in the WWF until January, but they knew he was coming in September. That gave THQ six months to add him to the game, but apparently that's too "last-minute" for them. Smackdown features a lot less moves than Wrestlemania 2000, making it a much more repetitive game. Each character has only four main grapple moves, and there's nothing to stop you from doing the same couple of moves over and over again. The only thing stopping you from winning a match with 20 atomic drops is your own desire to try something else. Needless to say, it's frustrating when you choose not to take the easy way out and then end up losing the match for your trouble. The "strong grapple moves" can only be executed when your opponent is dizzy, which is a rare occurrence. Wrestlemania 2000 has a much smarter system of making you hold down the grapple button for several seconds in order to do a strong grapple. The flow of the matches in Smackdown is ruined by the fact that they can (and often do) end out of nowhere, with no sense of drama or tension building up before the finish. Despite all of its flaws, WWF Smackdown manages to be very entertaining and somewhat addictive. What would really be awesome is a wrestling game that combines Wrestlemania 2000's grapple system and variety of moves with all of the new things that Smackdown brings to the table. Until that game is released, Wrestlemania 2000 is still the best overall wrestling game on the market in my opinion. Regardless of how it compares to Wrestlemania, there's no doubt that Smackdown is the best wrestling game on the PlayStation by far. Send your thoughts on this review to ivan@mastergamer.com
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