It's based on the Toukon Retsuden system, but for uncertain reasons (to represent the more limited movesets of American wrestlers, or on account of a mistaken belief that Americans suck at wrestling games, I don't know) they've taken out one of the grappling buttons. You have to be aggressive and position yourself well, but the game doesn't take an unfair advantage - you'll never see yourself being slammed and not understand why.Ī nagging problem remains the fact that the Smackdown grappling system is just a little bit too simple. The computer AI seems fairly well-balanced in that regard, by the way.

As in something like No Mercy or Attitude, there are also basic motions for blocks and reversals to learn, although they can always be circumvented by careful timing or positioning. Variations are performed by combining the attack buttons with a single D-pad direction and attacking your opponent from different directions while they are in different positions. There are two basic buttons - grapple and strike - which perform all of your attacks. Gameplay Smackdown 2 employs the same grappling engine used by its predecessor, a modified version of the system developer Yuke's designed for the New Japan-licensed Toukon Retsuden series some years back. The season mode is still, to sum things up bluntly, pretty whacko, and the absence of audio commentary remains a serious sticking point, but all the other odds and ends in this game should be more than enough to keep you happy until the PlayStation 2 hosts its own WWF outing. THQ delivered gameplay last time, and now we've got almost all the trimmings to go with it, including a very complete, up-to-date roster and a much-improved create-a-wrestler mode. We ought to be able to muster some kind of enthusiasm, though, because after the tortuous months of covering its development, the game has proven to be what we'd hoped it would be all along, clearly the best wrestling game on the PlayStation and packing a feature set much larger and well-rounded than the original Smackdown. We know that this is a momentous occasion for PlayStation-owning wrestling fans the world over, but please pardon us if we can't quite work up the energy to cheer. After waiting so long, after hundreds of screens and dozens of moves, a month of Countdown features, heaps of hideous questions, reading e-mail after e-mail with lines like 'can u do the 3d thru a table answer plz.' It's done, it's here, and the torment of Marc Nix is over.

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