Smackdown: Shut Your Mouth

The entrances look like they've been ripped off the show.

If a 7 foot 275 pound bouncer told me to shut my mouth, I would probably concede, however put the man in lycra underwear sporting his name and I may have an altogether different response. Everybody knows that wrestling is faked (isn’t it?), but that doesn’t stop people watching the shows in droves, and some of the moves look incredibly painful. Building on such a big franchise, Smackdown: Shut Your Mouth hopes to reclaim the championship belt from, well, probably the previous WWE game available, Just Bring It (they really have to improve these titles).

I remember the good old days of wrestling games on the Amiga with fondness (probably back when the game was sent to me – I hate the postal service. This must be the most delayed review ever…). The incredible feat of giving gamers the chance to run around the ring in a 2D representation of 3D was great fun. Limited moves, and a very simplistic set of game types made it repetitive fast, and strangely, even with all of the new fight types, at least five times as many fighters and moves, Smackdown: Shut Your Mouth can often seem to fall at the same hurdle.

King of the Ultimate Royal Cage Tornado Tag Table Match

A Royal Rumble. Makes one feel quite loved.

To be fair, there are an amazing amount of battles you can take part in; Table matches, Cage matches, Royal Rumbles, King of the Ring, three man Tornado Tag, loads more and an immense amount of combinations, but considering the bulk of the game is within the “Season” option, by which you get the chance to play through two years worth of episodes of the show, many of the matches are the same thing repeated.

Graphics within the game are nothing to sneer at, and the pre battle presentations, whereby you are treated to an entrance cinematic for each contender, are incredibly close to the actual television show. Combining live action FMV and the game engine works superbly, with brilliant animation and crowd chants, along with all of the wrestlers music tracks from the show, and the cinematics don’t stop there.

Vocally challenged?

A special smackdown move can provide a matrixesque spinning effect if your power bar is full!

Within the season mode, you’ll be witness to many moments that feel like they’ve been ripped out of your pay per view channel. Vince McMahan and Ric Flair (all characters do look like their real life counterparts) exchange heated words about who’s the best, Stephanie McMahan emerges and enters the ring, more heated debate culminating in Flair announcing that in the next pay per view his best will face McMahan’s best for control of both halves of the WWE, while the commentators exclaim “This is totally unexpected”.

Unfortunately, the commentators are the only people who have been given voices, with the exception of one line from Stone Cold Steve Austin, where he shouts “what” about 15 times. The rest of the cast are portrayed using text, and sometimes even the commentators are relegated to this primitive form of showing cinematics. This in turn causes another problem, because the cinematics have to be skipped through using your X button. Even this isn’t the worst problem, because it seems very irregular when you are meant to wait for the next line to appear automatically or when you are meant to skip the current one with X, and skipping at the wrong time will make you miss some information.

Do you expect me to lose?

Wander around the lobby to meet your manager or get into arguments in the locker room.

At certain story moments, you will get a cinematic at the end of a fight, but this is wholly unrelated to the fight that you have just had. You may have kicked Chris Jericho’s pixellated behind when you have control, and even K.O.’ed him, but after the match, the cinematic may show him beating the ropes out of you. There is nothing worse than having a superb match, only for it to be thrown into your face at the end because of how the designers felt the game should go.

Even if you lose, you won’t have to stop the season and can continue to try and improve your "star points" and unlock more hidden features. Unlockable items can be checked in the lobby that you start in before each fight, where you can investigate the locker room, exchange banter with other fighters and even request a title shot from your manager, and they include a few movies, new arenas to fight in during multiplayer modes, and more customisable options for your own custom fighter, and there are a lot of them.

Be your own man

Some people really know how to make an entrance. Fireworks included.

One of my favourite features of the game is the ability to create your own wrestler from scratch. Choose his (or her) size, shape, hair, tattoos, clothes, even entrance animations and moves that they can use. You can even create your own winning/entrance/taunting animations using a combination of preset animations, which really adds a personalisation to your characters. These characters can be used in the season mode, multiplayer and indeed any one off exhibition that you choose.

As similar as each fight seems to be, there is a certain element of addictiveness that the game achieves, which I attribute to the reasonably simplistic gameplay that is applied to the wide variety of options given. In the season mode, for example, you can even choose to interfere with a fight before your own, helping out your friends with a chair you’ve found under the ring.

Beat up your friends

In a cage match, you have to escape first to win. Being yanked down hurts.

Even though it has a few flaws, Shut Your Mouth is a very polished title, with plenty of reasons to keep playing. Without wrestler voices in the cinematics, I still want to play on with the season to try and unlock one more of the 50 odd features that’ll give my superstar custom wrestler (James) a better chance of victory against my flatmate’s choice of pugilist, and multiplayer is where the game clinched my approval.

The simplistic easy to pick up controls aid in being able to just pick the game up and play, and even after much practice on my part, my flatmate and I were very evenly matched. There’s nothing like taking on people you know in a multiplayer extravaganza where every special Smackdown move could be the end. Reversals keep the shouting high, and we even managed to come out of a series of games still as friends, although I doubt I’ll be able to borrow any of his DVDs for a while.

Sitting close to the TV

The Rock and Rico fight over who's on top.

So I guess it all boils down to whether or not it’s fun, and it really is. I’ve never been a great wrestling fan, but the game has made me want to watch the real thing, and friends of mine who seem to know far too much about the phenomenon assure me that the characters’ likenesses and moves are spot on, no doubt thanks to the excellent motion capture. Not to mention the similarly appalling script, which adds to the effect.

With plenty of fighters, matches and unlockable items, it’ll last you a long time before you’ve tried everything, and even when you have, as long as you’ve got friends, the game is a perfect way to take out your anger at your local pub’s closing time.