WWE SmackDown! vs. RAW 2006 (PS2) - Review

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High: Graphics are great, wonderful 3D models, one of the best wrestling games of the year if not of all time.
Low: Some of the new gameplay modes need polishing.


The WWE doesn’t have an off-season like the major sports do and thus you see a new wrestling game coming out faster than a yearly basis. The reason for that, however, is that there are different franchises for each console. The PS2 has had the Smackdown! Vs. Raw series, which fans had a good time with last year. This time, PS2-owning wrestling fans get second helping of the fun, but with an extra coat of polish that makes it one of the best wrestling games ever.

The first thing you’ll notice in WWE Smackdown! Vs. Raw 2006 are the graphics and its presentation. The character models of all the wrestlers are spot-on accurate to their real-life counterparts. All the details, from their skin and muscular definition to their eyes and facial expressions, look fantastic and are animated spectacularly. It’s not so improbable to mistake this game for a real telecast of one of their shows if you’re glancing at the TV from a distance.

What adds to the great presentation is the commentary from both teams of Jim Ross/ Jerry “The King” Lawler and Michael Cole/Tazz. Some of the things they say can and will get repetitive, but they sound natural on the mic and do go into detail if the wrestlers facing each other in the squared circle have a history. Another nice touch is that they’ll interrupt what they are saying to comment on a powerful move or unexpected counter.

The great character models carry over to the created characters you can make. Now, they aren’t as well detailed as the main roster, but when in the ring with one of them, the CAW holds its own and looks like they belong in the ring with the WWE superstar. What makes this all the more amazing is the sheer number of options laid at your fingertips when creating one. You alter head and body types, changing the sizes of almost every individual part as needed. That’s almost elementary in every “create-a-person” mode these days, but then you get to hair, skin, and facial hair styles and boy are there a lot to choose from. Then you have to cycle through hundreds of different articles of clothing and tattoos with which to adorn your virtual grappler with. And that’s just creating the look.

Next, you’ll want to create your character’s entrance. You can do so in two ways – easy creation and advance creation. With easy creation, you just pick a current superstar’s entrance (or select from a few preset edit animations), select music to come out, and lastly a movie that plays on the big screen. It really is easy, but if you use advance creation, you’ll have so much more control over it. In advance creation, you’ll be able to customize each portion of the entrance – stage, ramp, ring-in, and ring. The same animations from easy are here, but you’ll be able to mix and match the animations to create one with your own flavor. On top of that, you can control the camera placements, pyros and fireworks, and light coloring. Finally, add some music and maybe a video and your custom entrance is complete. The only bad part about it all is that you can’t preview the different parts of the entrance very quickly – the game needs to load a full portion to show it. Thus, it makes the whole creation process very slow and time-consuming. It would’ve been nice had they added small picture previews of these things, most specifically for the camera angles and pyro/fireworks. The character animations I can understand having to load for, but for those little things, it’s frustrating to sit through a good ten second load for every preview just to check out something that you may not even use.

After you’re done toying with these, you can then edit a moveset for your character, and if you’ve played the other Yuke’s developed wrestling games, you know that there are hundreds of moves to choose from. Unlike the tedious time-consuming nature of the create-an-entrance, this mode will be time-consuming because there is just so much to sift through. They have moves for almost every situation possible. Standing grapples, running grapples and strikes, ground moves, rebounds, top rope – you name it, and they’ve got it.

This brings us to SvR’s gameplay, which remains intact from Yuke’s previous games. Circle and a direction on the D-pad initiate a grapple. From there, circle and the d-pad again will perform a move. Each direction corresponds to a different move, so you can just imagine what kind of repertoire a single wrestler can have. There’s X for strike, triangle for running. The shoulder buttons take care of your reversals – L2 for strikes, R2 for reversals. Thankfully, the reversal window is a lot larger this time around, so you’ll be able to perform your fair share of reversals against the computer instead of having them being so one-sided in the AI’s favor. As you can see, series vets will feel right at home here.

Yuke’s has, however, added two new major gameplay elements – momentum and stamina. Momentum may not seem new to fans as it is the flashing bar underneath your player name on the screen and filling it enables your finisher. But filling it requires getting the crowd behind you. You can do this by performing your trademark moves that you set in your moveset, flying off the top rope, or hitting really big moves. That’s if you entered the match deciding to fight clean. If you entered and chose “fight dirty” either in your CAW’s profile or prior to an exhibition match, filling the meter has different requirements – fight with dirty moves or use a weapon on an opponent, just to name a few.

You’d thinking that just using your powerful moves repeatedly would be enough to fill your momentum meter and use that finisher of yours – and you’d be right. To balance that, Yuke’s has invoked the stamina meter. This meter depletes when a wrestler exerts himself, so using big moves over and over again will drain this fast. When it’s drained, your wrestler will double over in exhaustion. The only way to recover stamina is either by standing still in the ring or holding down select. The stamina system is a great way to balance the use of power moves to build momentum, though it can be turned off if all you want to do is hammer away on someone.

Now that we’ve gotten the basics of the gameplay, let’s check out the modes you can use them in. The first of those is the standard exhibition in which you can select any match type and square off against a friend or two or against the AI. And in following the trend of the create-a-mode, there are a great number of match types that you can compete in. Aside from the standard single and tag matches there are hardcore, steel cage, hell-in-a-call, elimination chamber, buried alive amongst a host of others. If you’ve seen it on WWE television, then it’s in here too. They’ve even added the fulfill-your-fantasy mode for the divas, which is just a modified bra-and-panties match that now includes pillow fighting and spanking. I’ll leave the rest of that to your imaginations.

When you’re done with that, it’s time to get into the meat of the SvR 2006 – season mode. Here you’ll take a superstar of your choice and take him through a whole WWE season from the summer events to the granddaddy of them all, Wrestlemania 21. The best thing about it is that there are multiple story lines, some of which are exclusive to certain characters, so playing through multiple times with different people is a must if you want to see everything season mode has to offer. That’s a good thing too since the mode itself is so short. It would have been nice to get a couple of title defenses after winning the world title at Wrestlemania.

The stars really shine here because everything is voice acted – no more crappy text menu driven season mode here. And for the most part, the voice acting is great. All of the talent did a great job here, which makes sense considering that they act as the characters on a weekly, if not nightly, basis. To ice it off even more is the fact that your CAW has a voice too in all of the cutscenes. You can choose from five voices during the character creation process. This adds more towards immersing you in the action and drama. It really does feel like you’re watching WWE’s weekly programming when you’re playing through this. Hell, some of the storylines in SvR 2006 are better written than some of the current content on the small screen.

The other meaty mode of the game is the general manager mode. With the GMs of each show becoming more important during the last few years, it was inevitable that a mode that puts you in their shoes would find its way into one its console games. Here you’ll be responsible for one show’s roster. You’ll be in charge of the booking and contracts of over 20 people at a time, so keeping track of every detail can be a little harrowing. The goal of this mode is to win the general manager of the year award. To do so, you’ll need to book matches, rivalries, and promos that further the rivalries you create to attract the audience and rake in the ratings. You can even slander the other brand in order to steal some of the other show’s fans and ratings. More ratings equal more money and more success, thus paving the way towards that GM of the year award.

Beyond that, there’s the create-your-own WWE pay-per-view and a create your own championship belt, both of which are self-explanatory. The best part of creating a belt is that you can challenge and defend them online. Online in SvR is serviceable, but the community has found ways that make playing a match rather irritating. Stack that on top of the many instances of lag, which for a timing-based game such as this is killer, and it’s not as fun as it could have been. That’s not to say that going online with this game is a bad thing, it’s just that the mileage per person will vary.

I already mentioned some bad things earlier – the tedium of preview created entrances, the brevity of the season mode, and some of the online stuff – and for the most part that’s it. The GM mode though needs some more combing over.

In short, it sounds fun, but in reality it’s a bit boring. Though you can control each of the matches you make, there’s really no point in doing so, especially since you’ll need to go through a few of them just to move on from the week. This makes the majority of the mode text-driven, which, like the rest of the major sports games out there, is quite boring. However, there is a silver lining here in that this is the first year it’s been implemented, and they already have a solid base with which to start from. It’ll be interesting to see how they further develop this mode in future installments as it has plenty of potential to become a fun mode, it just isn’t here in SvR 2006.

The last gripe I have is that Yuke has gotten the graphics and gameplay pretty much down, but the hit detection is still shoddy and there are a few clipping issues. You’ll occasionally miss a ground strike because your opponent is in his “getting up” animation, or a dive from the top rope will mysteriously miss even though it looked like it connected. The targeting system is really bad too, and with the referee a selectable target, it makes trying to avoid that DQ a little harder than it needs to be. And the belts on certain wrestlers or CAWs look odd because the person’s stomach or waist will clip right through the belt creating the image of an incomplete title. This also happens when wrestlers that differ greatly in size tie up – sometimes their arms will clip right through each other, even through heads at times. After all these years, you’d think that these problems would’ve been solved, but alas they’re still ever present.

Without a doubt, WWE Smackdown! Vs. Raw 2006 is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, wrestling game ever made. The graphics are some of the best seen on the PS2, showing that it ain’t done just yet; the amount of customization options is enormous; the gameplay was already solid as seen in previous years and Yuke’s up the ante by polishing some of the past blemishes; the season mode does an awesome job of recreating a WWE telecast; and lastly, the game is downright fun. Even if you own every other wrestling game to date, you need to add this to your collection regardless.

Reviewed By:EG Admin Reviewed On: Wed, 30 November 2005 05:30:14

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