Amazon.com: WWE Smackdown vs. Raw 2010: Xbox 360: Video Games

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3.8 out of 5 stars (36 customer reviews)

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13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Better than last year, but comes with new problems., May 19, 2010

Raven A. Wind (Michigan) - See all my reviews

= Fun:4.0 out of 5 stars

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This review is from: WWE Smackdown vs. Raw 2010 (Video Game)

I wish I could say that Smackdown vs RAW 2010 (SvR) is awesome and it fulfills all my desires as a fan of Create-A-Wrestlers (CAWs) and round-robin tournament season modes. Unfortunately, THQ and Yukes made lots of improvements and then purposely crippled the game in several ways to make those improvements much more useless than they would have been if they'd just treat fans of wrestling games like any other gamer.

First, let's talk about what they did right, though.

SvR has new wrestler models that look great. The pieces in the CAW/CAS mode are all rendered in 3D, and live on the character as a dimensional object rather than being "painted on" like previous years' versions. The end effect of this is that your CAWs look as good as the included WWE superstars when in the ring. Previously, it used to be obvious which was the "real" superstar and which was the CAW in this game. That has been fixed, finally, and it's about time!

The game itself has several modes, including all the expected ones like single match, Royal Rumble, etc. It has a career mode which can use a WWE Superstar or a CAW. It has a Road to Wrestlemania mode which requires one of a small selection of WWE Superstars as your character. It has training right at the main menu and several Create modes, as well.

The Create modes are all much improved. As stated, the CAW mode is a step up from previous years, but I'm also impressed with the Create-A-Finisher mode, in which you can string together moves to make a devastating finisher for your CAWs. It's quite versatile, and you can make some really crazy finishers with it.

The Create-An-Entrance mode is also very nice this year, allowing you to do a simple entrance (just pick one from a list) or an advanced, customized entrance that lets you pick different segments from lists, string them together, control fireworks, smoke, lighting and add entrance music from the included Superstar list, or from your own collection on your XBox 360 hard drive. (Although I'm perplexed as to why they require each song to be in its own playlist on your hard drive, instead of allowing us to make one playlist that has all the music in it.) It's quite satisfying to make a CAW and have him march down to the ring with all the flash and showmanship of a real WWE Superstar.

The actual wrestling is decent, if not as arcade-like as usual. The moves seem bigger and louder, and the impact more crushing than previous versions of the game. There's still a bit of clipping with the models, though, and the AI is abysmally stupid when on lower settings. Playing on the normal difficulty level makes for an easy game, as the computer opponents don't act like real Superstars. Mostly, they just let you pound on them and string moves, with the occasional attempt to break a hold or throw a punch.

The Create-A-Logo mode is pretty cool if you have the patience to work with the XBox controller and a semi-clunky design system. It's versatile, though, and you can pretty much draw anything you want to add to your wrestler.

The Story Design mode is pretty cool. It lets you work out just about any of the standard WWE-style storylines however you want, with whichever Superstars you want. You can type in text for the cutscenes and set up matches to either watch or play. All in all, a decent attempt at adding some dimension to the game.

The online mode is, as usual, only as good as the other people playing. I don't even bother because the cheap button-mashing kids tend to dominate the online realm, and I don't have the patience for them. They don't want to put on a show or watch entrances or play it as if it's a real wrestling match with any kind of pacing--- They just rush in and start punching like mad, and it quickly degrades to a messy waste of time. It might be good if you're a button-masher, though, and I give Yukes credit for making the game work well online (finally).

The ability to download other people's CAWs is a much-welcomed addition to the game. The range of CAWs out there is pretty vast, and you can usually find excellent versions of whichever wrestler you're looking for, as well as lots of originals.

Now, here's where I get into what's so very, very WRONG with this game:

The online CAW trading, which effective for swapping CAWs, is crippled severely. The major problem is that you cannot, under ANY circumstances, edit anything you download. That means that you get a lot of CAWs with no music or wrong music in their entrances (user music won't upload or download, so you're stuck with the built in music or nothing at all) and you can't fix this on your end. It's disappointing that we have this technological marvel of a gaming platform, and we're not *allowed* to use one of the best features it offers. I understand not being able to edit downloaded wrestlers (so people don't claim your work as their own), but why not their entrances? That just makes no sense. This one major flaw almost ruins the CAW swapping feature.

The CAW mode itself has a lot of major flaws, too. The biggest one is that there are tons of parts no longer present in the game. Want to make a wrestler who wears camouflage tights? Too bad. They're not here. You can't use the Create-A-Logo mode to make them, either, as THQ is *still* censoring the ability to put any pattern over a CAW's crotch area. Any pattern you make for tights will leave a big, blank gap in the crotch, which if you ask me, looks WORSE and MORE OBVIOUS than if THQ had just let you draw a pattern there! It's incredibly stupid design, and it's about time THQ grew the hell up and let us use the CAW mode as we see fit. If some kids want to doodle naughty bits and put them on tights, so what? The vast majority of us are going to use to to put legitimate logos on the pants or tights.

Of course, they also included the "feature" where you have to play through all the game modes and do specific things to unlock all the characters, parts, and modes. It's stupid, if you ask me, because so many of us don't care about the WWE Superstars, and just want a good wrestling game where we can use our CAWs. Unfortunately, SvR is always biased against CAWs, and this year's no different. Your CAW's skills are all set very low to start, and you have to build them up, sort of like in an RPG. I can't think of any other sports title that does this; Most of them let you train, or assign points as you see fit. In the Fire Pro series, you could make anyone you liked, and assign points however you wished. Unfortunately, the WWE license is what screws up Yukes' efforts for us CAW players.

Another problem is that the Story Design mode is crippled by the fact that you can only have a total of ten appearances by CAWs in it, throughout an entire story. That's not ten different CAWs, but ten *appearances* by CAWs, which basically means your CAWs are only showing up in cameo roles. Forget about making a wrestling event starring only CAWs, because you can't do it-- Halfway through the event you run out of slots and you can only choose from the built-in Superstars.

The Career Mode is fundamentally damaged, as well. There's no round-robin, ever-running tournament like in the excellent Fire Pro series. Instead, you're given a selection of three or four guys to fight, and you have to build up "points" by winning to be able to fight the top contender or champ. Your opponents don't seem to be selected from your CAWs, either, but from the built-in WWE Superstars, so if you play as a CAW, you'll be the only one in the entire career mode, most likely. There are no cutscenes in this mode, and it's pretty much just a shorter, cheaper version of Road to Wrestlemania without the voice-overs or focus on Wrestlemania.

The biggest, most unforgivable problem with the game, though, is the way it handles saved games, CAW files, and other data. Unlike *every other XBox 360 game made* you can't use the XBox dashboard to copy or move your WWE SvR 2010 files from one storage unit to another. This means that, unless you get the hard drive migration tool, you can't switch hard drives on your XBox 360 and expect to keep all your own CAWs and saved games. The game flat-out REFUSES to allow you to copy anything without deleting your CAWs. The best you can do, it seems, is to copy the base settings and saved game without any CAWs, which means, essentially, that THQ and Yukes expect you to throw away hours of work because they don't want you to have control over the game's files.

Attempts to copy or move CAWs from one storage device to another from within the game meet with similar problems. The game won't let you do it. CAWs, it seems, are only allowed to exist on the hard drive they were initially saved to.

It's pathetic that THQ crippled the game so much, and made it nearly impossible for someone to migrate to a bigger hard drive without loss of data. I had to purchase a separate drive migration tool in order to keep all my CAWs. If not for this one game, I could have used the XBox 360's built-in storage or an external device to migrate successfully. Every other game I owned, including all the downloaded titles from XBox Live Arcade, were allowed to be moved to a different storage device. It was ONLY SvR that refused to allow this feature to work.

Finally, there are some major glitches in the CAW save system. When you edit a CAW or make additional attires for him, all the data for your Created Entrance is erased and you'll have to do it all over again. I strongly suggest you don't bother making an entrance for any CAW until you're certain you're completely, totally finished editing or copying him, unless you want to go through Create-An-Entrance again.

Once again, THQ and Yukes deliver a... Read more ›

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10 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Could this be the revival the franchise has been needing for so long now?, October 21, 2009

Marvin Powell - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)

= Fun:3.0 out of 5 stars

Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)

This review is from: WWE Smackdown vs. Raw 2010 (Video Game)

As a WWE nut, the closest me or anyone really could get to being in the world of the WWE is through the SmackDown vs RAW games and it's creator content. Since the "2006" game, however, the franchise has been dwindling steadily downhill, with the game getting worse and worse and worse every year, by THQ either taking out content such as match types or wrestling moves for custom movesets, limiting players abilities to do things like give Created Superstars attributes without going through a whole song-and-dance routine, or by simply not giving us enough of what we want, like a full WWE roster (jobbers and midcarders, included). Last year's game was so cheap and barebones, I didn't even keep it. And a lot of people were just as unsatisfied, as well. This year's game's "Gimmick" seems to be all about the user-created content. "But isn't that weird?" you might ask, considering that the games have *always* had this. What makes things better this year? ARE things even better?

Well, I can tell you that while still not where it needs to be, especially for a 2010 game, WWE SmackDown! vs RAW 2010 is a step in the right direction and a (slight) improvement over last year's game enough so to be an improvement. Great, no. Not by a long shot. But good... meh, I guess if you compared to "2007", "2008", and "2009". It seems pretty much impossible by now that THQ and Cory Ledesma (the guy in charge of the WWE SmackDown! vs RAW video games) will give us what we truly want. They're very much strict on letting us players actually customize whatever we want or do whatever we want. Every year we're forced to play "their" way and to do things by "their" rules, instead of having full, unlimited customization, access and gameplay. But at least 2010 gives us more than what we've had in the past.

STORYLINES/SEASON MODE

As far as storylines go, the Road To Wrestlemania is back. And it's pretty much the exact same thing. That sucks, I guess, depending on if you liked last year's RtW storyline or not. It's more of the same thing. You take a specific WWE Superstar through a storyline, that leads up to Wrestlemania and them winning (or not winning) the top belt. I guess this year, they tried to give you more choices and options in the mode, resulting in alternate paths in the Road to Wrestlemania for one guy. The problem is, if you're NOT a fan of Cena, Edge, or Randy Orton, playing through their mode (to complete the game and unlock things) can be quite the chore. It's only as fun as your personal preference to the superstar.

GM MODE/STORY DESIGNER

Next, there's the STORY DESIGNER. At last, I can finally say General Manager's Mode is BACK! Only this year, it's named the "Story Designer" and allows for more imagination than what the GM Modes of past games offered. Okay, so it's not *technically* GM Mode. But it works similar to it, minus the nitty-gritty details like budgets, injuries and superstar morale. You can edit and create just a lot of unique WWE scenarios using this new Story Designer. Type in dialogue, and watch your superstars say it on-screen (through words, not actual voices, even though that would be so cool!) Customize the camera angles, choose your cast and watch it play out on TV. There ARE some limitations; some ignorable, some outright insane. The biggest one being how restricting they are with your Created Superstars. You can only use them a few times in any given story, and cannot mix genders in storylines that aren't romantic based. This very sadly means, no creating your own alternate WWE Universe with an entire roster of your own created WWE Talent. Yes, you will have to use John Cena and the real superstars the majority of the time because you're very much limited with Created Superstars in the Story Designer. At first I didn't know why they did this, but then I've figured out it's because you can export your created stories onto the web. So what that means is instead of being able to use your created people an infinite number of times, they instead only allow you to "clone" them, up to ten times per story, so that it's possible to export them off your game without affecting your "real" created superstar. I'm pretty sure there wouldn't be nearly as much limitations on them if they had just decided you'd rather record them and post them on YouTube than actually exporting them off the game, itself. Yeah, this sucks big time and it's annoying, but if you can get past that, you really can create your own WWE Universe (you'll just have to stick to using the real-life WWE Superstars and the small number of preset animations given.)

CREATE A SUPERSTAR

The Create A Superstar mode (unoffically referred to as 'CAW' or 'Create-a-Wrestler') is somewhat beefed up now and you can create more than ever before. Unfortunately, THQ still motion scans all of their superstars in the game, meaning no matter WHAT you do and how hard you spend editing your superstars, they'll still look like phony, created digital people with detection issues rather than the realer looking WWE Superstars. The 3D Objects help make them look "less fake" but they still only look "less fake" and not actually "real" even if you're trying to create someone real and not 'The Joshinator' kid from the TV commercials. The problem with creating superstars is that there seems to be some kind of psuedo-realistic limitation to how much stuff you can put on one guy, due to the 3D limiations of the technology. You're given "points" to spend on clothes and objects, and the more points means the more complicated the superstar's wardrobe is, which of course, means restrictions. 48 points seems fair enough, but the major issue is that hair can take up to 32 out of those 48 points! Yes, just the hair! (If you want a guy to be wearing a fancy business suit, you'd best make him bald!) Also, the Hairstyles in this game still suck, as they ALWAYS have! Unless you're creating a White male age 18-30, don't expect any good hair choices here. Even women's hairstyles in this game are limited. Maybe they (incorrectly) figured not too many people make created divas?

I should also point out, there is a HUGE problem with creating Divas. The good news is, they can compete in most any of the formerly Male-only matches. The BAD news is, no more Divas against Superstars! No more Women vs Men. Why, man?!? This sucks, for sure! I can understand real WWE Divas don't fight Superstars too often, but this KILLS Created Superstar-Diva interaction, which is really the true fun of these games. But maybe THQ did it to be more realistic? Or perhaps to cater to the PG-WWE audience that has plagued WWE for the past year and a half now? I don't know, but it blows. The "no intergender matches" and "ten created superstars per story" are the two biggest issues in this game and those two alone take away one and a half (if not two) whole stars from this game's review. It's THAT bad.

Oh yes. Addding stat attributes is now much easier than before. Mostly, all you do is have Created Superstars compete in matches and they earn "Experience Points" in that way. You can then use the points to boost whatever stats you wish. And this works even if you don't play with them yourself, and let the computer do all the work for you, while you watch TV. Of course, the irony in "cheating" by letting the computer earn the points for you is that you'll have to make sure they'll be put into a match type they can win, despite their weak stats, like a two-on-one handicap match, for example. In fact, doing handicap matches is a good way to boost two created superstars points, at once. Another way is to have them fight against another created superstar whose stats are even lower than theirs.

Create-A-Finisher is also back. And this time, you can do diving finishers. I have to say the diving finishers are a lot more fun and creative than the Front Grapple finishers (I only make striking finishers out of them, such as punch combos) but ultimately, using the premade ones that already exist are probably better, as again, Create A Finisher most of the time, will only let you create most moves that already exist in one way or another, anyhow. So even IF you create your own custom powerbomb, there'll probably already be a move like that or similar to it in the game's huge animated moveset. The only fun really that you'll get out of them is by getting to name your finishers. Or, if you can pull off something totally bizarre and truly unique using it.

ENTRANCES & PRESENTATION

The Highlight Reel Create-An-Entrance is back now and this year, you can actually MAKE entrances with it now! Go figure. What really surprises me is how User Friendly the Highlight Reel is. No, you don't have to know AfterEffects to make your own, cool entrance video. You DO, however, have to fish for footage during matches, though, and save them for later when you actually create the video. It'd be a lot simplier if you cold just make whatever match scenario you wanted IN the mode, instead of having to get footage now, and edit it later. But I'm not really complaining. The Highlight Reel IS cool and actually adds more replay value overall to the game. The more creation modes, the better the game gets, overall, and this helps, big time.

The Create an Entrance options are still more of the same, though. Most are just recyled animations of former WWE Superstars or older, outdated animations of current ones like Randy Orton's old Legend Killer one, or Chris Jericho's Y2J Pose entrance. The names for Created Superstars are long gone now, sadly. Why?!? No more "Chris" or "Christina", but instead you now get 'The Superstar' and 'Thunder!' That sounds fun! (Not.) THQ, please bring back actual names for our Created Superstars! I very much dislike my guy having to be called The Prince... Read more ›

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11 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The best Smackdown vs. Raw game in the series., October 20, 2009

Sergio S. Lamadrid "XBOX Fanboy" (Brooklyn, NY) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)

= Fun:5.0 out of 5 stars

This review is from: WWE Smackdown vs. Raw 2010 (Video Game)

I've had this game since the 17th, and have already maxed it out on achievements. This game is definitly an easy achievement game, a lot easier than 07, 08 or 09. If you're interested in a quick 1000, this could definitly be up your alley.

I will assume most people looking at this review have played at least one of the last 3 year's games (07,08 and 09). Having played all of them, I can easily say this is the best in the series. They made a ton of tiny changes, that make the game more realistic (More reversal animations, leap-frogging or ducking a running opponent, red marks on your chest/back after taking a Ric Flair-patented chop).

What's better this year in comparion to '09? Well pretty much everything. There's nothing '09 had '10 doesn't that makes a difference. The gameplay is almost identical, yes so much better with the addition of the tapping out system, the flipping bodys over. The only thing I miss about '09 was the two-button reversal. ('09 had a reversal system where LT was pushed to reverse strikes, and RT to reverse Grapples. Now pressing RT and timing it correctly will reverse both).

Create a superstar is SO MUCH BETTER. Looking online to see creations that were up, I saw "The Flash" from DC Comics fame, and it looked identical. Suicide from TNA was also found, and again that was almost identical to the real life version. I know I'll be having fun with this feature, months down the line. The loading times are almost gone entirely too.

Road to Wrestlemania bothered me a bit. They basically took old storylines, and added new twists, and remade the cast. For example, Edge's RTWM is a re-hash of the "La Familia" storyline that took place last year, however instead of it being Vicky Guerrero, it was WWE Diva Maria. The stories aren't identical, there are new changes, and new twists, but I already saw this storyline. I wanted something ENTIRELY brand new. There was a lot of "Holy crap" and "LMAO" moments. For anyone who doesn't mind playing through old storylines with new twists this isn't a problem. The stories aren't half-bad at least.

The soundtrack to the game has most of the WWE superstars tracks, but it does have a few songs that were very good. For a true WWE fan the soundtrack is perfect.

The videos in the game, like the opening cutscene to anybody's RTWM is crystal clear. Amazing quality, as are the entrace videos. These literally blew me away.

Scramble matches, intergender tag matches, Divas can now play pretty much every match type, interfereces were some nice new additions as well. I was surprised and happy to see unlockables in the game such as THE ROCK, and TRISH STRATUS. However dissapointed with pointless characters like the Red and Green dummies.

Lastly, the biggest mode in the game. What most were waiting for. The addition of Create-a-storyline. I do not believe this is as User-friendly as they wanted it to be, but once you start learning what to do, this will be the most used feature in my opinion. Not as many choices concerning promos, but for a first year attempt this was amazing. Hardcore WWE fans will go nuts over this. Now that I've maxed it out in achievements, I will be spending my time making stories, and putting them on youtube, in between matches with my other WWE-crazed fans.

Many people complain that any game that has a yearly installment is a rip-off. Not many changes are implemented, and that it's basically a $60 roster-update you're purchasing. I've heard this said for MLB, NBA, NFL games as well. With Smackdown 10, it's nowhere near the case. If you liked '09 in the slightest, or just felt that it had potential, well 2010 is what you've been waiting for.

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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Fun
I did not realize what a fan of WWE my nephew was. He loves this game! He got another WWE game with his Christmas gift cards.

Published 28 days ago by denawtn

4.0 out of 5 stars good game
fun game. love the customization.
Royal Rumble sucks...hard to do. also, countering moves is hard as heck too...
other than that, its great.

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