THQ has developed what could have been a decent DS contender in Smackdown Vs Raw 2009, but they forgot one of the most important parts of game design: fluid and intuitive controls. The game doesn’t bother starting you with a tutorial to explain the complex touch-screen mechanics. None of them are easy or even possible to figure out on your own, and they are easy to forget even when you do try to learn them. The result is a game that’s a lot less fun to play than it should be.
Seriously, who would ever think that drawing circles on the screen would perform a grapple? Unless it’s explained to you, you’d never think to perform that action. Pinning requires you input the same action, as does activating your finisher plus an additional button. Try timing all these obtuse and overwrought actions in-time with the grogginess of an opponent and learn what it feels like to rip hair from your own scalp.
The D-pad controls movement, which works wonderfully. However, the D-pad also alters which attack you’ll perform when swiping the stylus. Usually you’ll throw punches, sometimes you’ll kick, and maybe, if you’re lucky, you’ll dropkick or elbow drop someone. If you can figure out how to get a consistent dropkick off, it’s going to be your best friend. Since pinning an opponent is all but impossible, having them follow you outside the ring and knocking them down via, you guessed it, the dropkick, at about the five or six-count is likely going to result in a win. They never get up before the nine-count, and it takes too long to get back into the ring.
The fact that it plays so terribly is a shame. The engine would have been seen as one of the best if this were released on 32 or 64-bit systems with traditional controls. There really does seem to be a lot of playability buried underneath the inadequate and woeful control scheme. There’s also an RPG-style career mode – something the wrestling fan in me pined for in 1999 and gave up on somewhere around 2005. It’s a shame there’s not much to do besides meander around hallways and talk to NPCs with two sets of dialogue, but hey, most ideas start small.
The wrestlers, while there are only 29 of them, are as closely modeled as the DS hardware will allow for, and the arenas are decently detailed as well. The crowd suffers from the 2D Muppet look most old-style wrestling games sport, but it’s not really all that surprising since the crowds on the PS2 games had the same problem for years. Besides, who wouldn’t rather the detail go into the wrestlers? Nobody’s paying for a realistic crowd-simulator. The entrance themes are all of decent quality as well, though all other music in the game is low-quality D-grade MIDI-trash that sounds like it was ripped right from the elevator in 1998’s N64/PlayStation title WWF War Zone.
If THQ were to release this game next year with a more traditional or reliable control scheme, updated roster and deeper career mode, they would have a product that DS owners might actually enjoy taking part in. As it stands, Smackdown Vs Raw 2009 is a broken mess. Sure, winning via count-out is a viable strategy, but fans aren’t paying to play like that in every match. When something as simple as pinning an opponent is an awkward, complicated and unreliable task, you probably need to take a good, long look at your core mechanics.
