WWE Smackdown vs. RAW 2007 demo on Xbox Live

Oh my god Smackdown Vs Raw is actually quite good

Stamina bar = great
Small reversal windows = great
Slower gameplay = great

Those 3 things alone pretty much fixes the problems that every wrestling game I've played since No Mercy had. They've all been too fast, has overly excessive amount of reversals to the point of silliness and had stupid things like getting up straight away after falling off the Hell in a Cell or taking 3 seconds to recover from getting busted open in the face.

The controls are still a bit of a mystery to me at the moment but this is good stuff. I love being able to set up a table, hold people in the air, walk to the table then chokeslam them through it. Technically it's decent at best with mostly the same animations as the PS2 games and the graphics aren't THAT much better really, but there's some nice little touches like HHH getting visibly wet when he spits the water out and blood actually dripping down thier face onto the mat. I dunno if i'll spend £40 on this, especially since I swore off THQ's wrestling games since Day of Reckoning 2 but I might go and trade in some old Xbox games I'll never touch again to soften the blow.

Yes

The reversals pretty much ruined it for me, they were too easy. 2 player games with my mate just turned into a string of reversals - something we hated the Smackdown games for also. Specials were too easy to get too, you charge one up and if you manage to use it once you can more often than not use it again straight after and before you know it you're 80% towards building up another one. Solid engine, decent controls, but largely spoilt by these two things for me.

It's in the works


A single match, HHH Vs Kane, no time limit.