Video Game Review: WWE Smackdown VS. Raw 2008

The WWE's series of video games called Smackdown have been going on for a long time. The Smackdown games aren't completely horrible. They look nice, have tons of moves, they have real wrestlers and a create-a-wrestler mode to make whoever you want. There is one glaring problem with the Smackdown series though and that is the storyline mode.

I've always been more of a fan of the wrestling than the lame storylines in the WWE but for a video game it's different. A video game is always better when there is some kind of storyline and that sort of thing should definitely be present in a pro wrestling game.

In the latest WWE game called WWE Raw vs. Smackdown 2008 the storyline mode is called the 24/7 mode and it is quite possibly actually worse than last year's storyline mode.

The 2007 version of Smackdown actually had some pretty decent stories; each one started the night after a Pay Per View and went until the Pay Per View, much like in real life. The problem was that the storylines only last one full year and the next year you do the same storylines over again.

In the 2008 version of Smackdown the first whole year isn't even that enjoyable. At one point in time in my 24/7 mode as Edge I had a storyline where I feuded with ECW and the feud went on for about five months at least. It's bad enough that one story went so long but the story wasn't really even good. It was just one week you wrestle this ECW guy, then next week you wrestle this ECW guy, and then you fight the guy you fought the first week again. Apparently destroying him wasn't good enough the first time.

I also have a problem with half of the year being dedicated to feuding with the ECW roster. No offense to CM Punk, Elijah Burke and Tommy Dreamer because I like all of them, but if I'm playing a WWE game and feuding with wrestlers they aren't the guys I would choose to be the focus. Triple H, Shawn Michaels, Edge, John Cena, the Undertaker, the Hardyz and many others should be used a lot more than any of them. I think I only had one match with Triple H and my path didn't cross with John Cena, the most popular wrestler in the WWE, at all.