Product DescriptionFrom the most successful wrestling game series of all time comes the next phenom in sports entertainment, WWE Smackdown! vs. Raw. Two worlds will collide as the most elite Superstars square off on the Xbox 360. WWE programming comes to life with authentic Superstar Voice Over and commentary throughout the season mode An abundance of new gameplay mechanics give full control over all aspects of the game including new chop battles, submission reversals, match tactics and upgraded Royal Rumble controls. The Divas are hotter than ever with an enhanced Bra and Panties Match, and to polish off the robust roster, from the halls of immortality, come a handful of the most celebrated legens ever to lace up their boots. The influential Smackdown! Series has evolved into one single definitive experience that is WWE Smackdown! vs. Raw. Smackdown! vs. Raw will have all new gameplay mechanics including a chop battle, pre-match stare down, new grappling position, test of strength and submission reversal system. Make HBK tap out in the Sharp shoot, vanquish HHH in a cage match, defeat six legends with the legend-killer Randy Orton - these are just a few of the 60 challenges that await! Opportunity to choose if you want to fight dirty or win over the crowd, adding more strategy and personality to each match Outstanding graphics upgrade Improved Royal Rumble mechanics ESRB Rated T for Teen - The heart of the Smackdown! Series is the Season-Story mode with the addition of authentic Superstar VO and commentary.
- For the first time ever in a WWE game, fans can compete online in head-to-head action.
- New storylines with bigger double-crosses and over-the-top surprises.
- Create a Championship Belt and then set up your own PPV to defend it. Be careful - lose a match and lose your Championship, as it will transfer to the other player's memory card!
- New WWE Legends, including one of the all-time greats, Andre the Giant!
Customer ReviewsReviewed on 2008-06-18  
A step backwards in almost every way.
The series is no longer aimed at the older gamer. In an attempt to simplify the controls they instead made them overly complicated. SvR06 had 25 front grapples, SvR08 has 12. Why the step backwards? Why does a PS2 game from 2005 offer more customization, with more moves, than a Xbox 360 title? What was wrong with manual targeting that they had to completely remove it? Why can you still throw someone outside and apply unblockable headlock after unblockable headlock? Why did they change the animation for this, but not fix the unblockable glitch?
Any long time Smackdown fans will ask themselves these questions and more. This is not a fun ride at all. You're forced into playing the way Yuke's wants you to, not the way you want to. Either you use the analog sticks or you don't play. Either you hope manual targeting works (it usually doesn't) or you don't play.
One scroll through of the roster will confirm my previous statement about this game being for children. All of the wrestlers are stacked in attributes with no real weaknesses present and half of them have a championship.
The biggest problem with this game are the fighting styles. They took things from previous games that everyone could do and separated them into categories. To make the kids happy they added features that allow you to make your character invincible to strikes, grapples, submissions and pinfalls.
Unlike in previous titles there's no strategy in this version of SvR. It s a race to the finish. A race filled with glitches, cheapness and overpowered brutes with unblockable abilities.
Recommended only for hyper little children with a short attention span and no skill beyond repeatedly mashing buttons and flicking analog sticks like actors do in sitcoms when their character is supposed to be playing a video game. |  | Reviewed on 2008-06-11
The Same Old Smackdown
When i first bought this game i though to myself, Lets hope they do something different this time around, I enjoyed playing the matches, Playing with friends makes this way more fun, As always the CPU if set to higher difficulty is invincible. The roster let me down so much. The story line was tired and boring, also repetitive and made no sense whatsoever. It was more of a chore than an experience. The game does look very good, detail was well done. The voice overs were great, the commentary was not. As a matter of fact, there is an option to turn off the commentary! There is even an absense of legends and regular superstars! This game, in my opinion, Is only fun if your with friends.
Still, Its worth picking up. | | Reviewed on 2008-06-10
Good, not great. Far from great, actually.
The Good:
The game is phenomenal with graphics, even for created superstars. The movelist is sensational, and tremendous. There's even moves you'll never see in the WWE, such as the Canadian Destroyer, Asai DDT, Shooting Star Press, and others. The setup of wrestler classes provides for some fun pseudo-finisher bonuses (like the Powerhouse Rampage or the Showstopper finisher stealer) and make for more interesting play.
There's an intensely big variety of matches, and some innovative ways of building up your created superstar to a score of 100 (the highest WWE superstar is John Cena with 97, the lowest Snitsky and Shane McMahon with 82, and the divas are below 70).
The Bad:
For one, what really killed my momentum as a new player was the reversing of the trigger buttons; for the Gamecube, R was to reverse strikes, L was to reverse grapples. It's reversed here. As well, button mashing appears to be the same disoriented mess that it was in Day of Reckoning 2; that is, it tries not to encourage button mashing, but doesn't really have any other option... perhaps "slowly" mashing the buttons? It doesn't even really matter because your chances of getting up quickly after just one hit are far slimmer than they would be in DOR2.
I was amazed, amused, and annoyed when starting with WWF Wrestlemania X8, you could break up moves in progress by attacking the people involved, or hitting them with your grapple move. More like WWF Wrestlemania 2000 or No Mercy, this game undos that---you cannot break up grapple moves in progress at all in this game. Even breaking up pins or submissions is a sloppy affair which may or may not even work.
I played and owned WWE Smackdown vs Raw 2007, and thought it was great. 2008 takes away a great concept... stamina recharge. In 2007, you could press and hold a button to regenerate stamina after some brutal bouting. In 2008, you don't; you just have to stand around doing nothing to build it back up, just like in DOR2.
The struggle submission system is just an absolute mess. About the only "struggle" in this submission system is the struggle of smashing the control stick with your palm to get it to break you loose. Because they've only just substituted button-mashing A with button-mashing the control stick side to side. Even then it appears to be a crapshoot as to whether I'll break out of a submission hold early. I can't even see or have control over submitting! Whereas in previous games, a bar would show you how close you are to submitting, in this game it doesn't tell you jack, just leaving you to smash the stick around and pray you don't randomly submit.
I don't know when this started in the Smackdown vs Raw franchise, but having been a veteran of WWF Wrestlemania 2000 all the way to WWE Day of Reckoning 2, it came as an utter shock in SvR07, and continued in SvR08, of pretty pathetic sexism on the WWE's part, as women are not allowed to wrestle in ANY match that isn't a normal, iron man, or submission match. That means no women flying off the top of steel cages, no women prying the Women's championship belt from the top of a ladder, no women backstage in the parking lot.
Argue all you want that the WWE doesn't show that anyway, but they HAVE had it happen before, AND they've let women wrestlers do it as recently as 2005 in WWE Day of Reckoning 2!
Rather unlike DoR and DoR2, the certain chain-wrestling feel of the game is completely eliminated here in favor of stilted action featuring strikes and grapples, unable to be interrupted, save for with generic reversals and counters which could not for the life of them pass off as chain-wrestling. It's clearly a brawler/powerhouse's game, as the advantages of a technical or submission wrestler or high flyer are pretty much nonexistant---a higher level high flyer or technical wrestler of equal skill to a lower level powerhouse or brawler will always lose, because the "pretty" moves are nowhere near as effective as the "effective" moves.
AND IN FACT! That is EXACTLY what it does! Playing the game on Xbox Live is utter hell, as the vast majority of players are the kind who soup up their custom characters to level 100, give them generic names like "KILLA" or "DX DEMON" or "THUG FACE MUGGER" in ALL CAPS, either being the most boring generic John Cena lookalikes or obnoxiously dressed like the Insane Clown Posse in neon green hoodies. And virtually all the players are brawler or hardcore slash powerhouses---because being a Powerhouse gives you the ability "rampage" which makes all your grapples unreversable and makes you auto-rever all grapples done to you.
You can see the destruction begin just with that...
Unless you play with friends, or manage to find the one rarity that plays at your level, or bothers to actually WRESTLE, you'll pretty much be outright fighting---not wrestling. It seems every random asshole mentioned above will fill their movelist solely with the easiest to use spears, big boots, running STOs, and other hard and generic slams, and will immediately rush at you to do a running spear or running STO, and proceed to do nothing but these moves directly on you until they fill their momentum bar, use Rampage ability, continue to do the same, and pin you. The absolute worst of these will do nothing but their running grapples---spears or running STO's.
This pretty much renders online wrestling impossible. You'll just be online fighting.
In SvR07, I was blown away by not only the variety but the creativity in choice of legends. You can unlock perennial favorites like Stone Cold Steve Austin, The Rock, and Mick Foley, but you can also unlock all three of Foley's faces (Cactus Jack, Mankind, Dude Love), The American Dream Dusty Rhodes, Eddie Guerrero, Hulk Hogan, Bam Bam Bigelow, Jerry Lawler, Jim Neidhart, Roddy Piper, Taz, Bret Hart, Mr. Perfect, etcetera. THAT is one hell of an impressive legends roster, and big enough to fill WWECW's roster on Sci-Fi! Imagine re-enacting the classic bouts between Bam Bam Bigelow and Taz from Living Dangerously 98 and Heatwave 98!
In SvR08, the legends roster is back to status quo: Stone Cold Steve Austin, The Rock, Mick Foley, Roddy Piper, Bret Hart. The only fun new additions are Rick Rude and Terry Funk.
As for the roster, it's actually more accurate in reflecting the WWE's roster at the time of its release---razor thin.
SvR07 had a far wider variety and size in its roster, including several superstars who remained and remain contracted to the WWE and on WWE TV, but were apparently not good enough to fit in the already undersized WWE SvR08 roster.
The roster is missing: Jillian Hall, the Boogeyman, Lance Cade, Trevor Murdoch, Paul London, Brian Kendrick, Hardcore Holly, Super Crazy, Shelton Benjamin, Charlie Haas, Kevin Thorn, Nunzio (Little Guido), Viscera (Big Daddy V), Matt Striker, The Miz (thank god), John Morrison (note, he's actually in the game, but still as Johnny Nitro), Balls Mahoney, Deuce and Domino, etcetera.
The roster includes: Chris Masters, The Sandman, Sabu, and King Booker. These four were released well before the game was released, and considering how they rushed to remove all traces of Chris Benoit from the game, they probably kept these four in to keep the roster from being COMPLETELY AND TOTALLY BORING! How much fun can you have with Kennedy Kennedy and Elijah Burke vs Snitsky and Chavo Guerrero compared to Paul London and Brian Kendrick vs Shelton Benjamin and Balls Mahoney?
Almost the most insulting of all is the score level. As I mentioned above, you can train your character up to be 100, and the WWE Superstars have preset scores. These numbers represent their skills in strength, speed, hardcore, charisma, stamina, durability, technical prowess, and submission.
So how insulting it is for WWE legends that John Effing Cena, the 5 Moves of Doom wonder, rates THE HIGHEST IN THE GAME over the likes of Ric Flair at a piddling 88, or Terry Funk at a flimsy 89.
In the end, this edition stands as a flimsy "Paycheck Game" release. That is, a game rushed to production solely for the sake of making money and updating their roster. | | Reviewed on 2008-04-25
reality bites
WWE games are certainly getting better as the years go by, which is more than I can say for the story lines of the shows. SD vs. Raw '08 is very life-like. The intro's are spot on, the detail in the characters is impressive and the game play itself is very realistic (for a fake sport). I enjoy this version more so than the '07 game. | | Reviewed on 2008-04-01
Layeth the smacketh down I say
I have heard the bad reviews and most of them can't even spell F-U-N or W-R-E-S-T-L-I-N-G G-A-M-E. This game is awesome for WRESTLING FANS who actually like the sport and pay for the ppv and watch it every Monday. Or for people who have played others before. Anybody should enjoy this game so give it a chance. The new modes offer variations that are long but repetitive but I overlook that because I feel like a wrestler. I can create my own entrance and character, belt, stable, all in hitch. Buy this game it's awesome. | |
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