At first I was a little disappointed in one of the two career modes, Road to Wrestlemania, in that I could only pick from 6 different storylines (5 singles, one tag) with a few wrestlers involved that I couldn't care less about checking out. However, I quickly realized that this resulted in a tighter gameplay experience, offering up quite a bit of voice acting, match types, and overall improvement in visuals and ring side announcing than the previous titles had. Did it make me want to play thru each and every story? Not quite, but the ones that I did check out, like Jericho, I enjoyed quite a bit.

However, the other career mode, that allows you to put your user created wrestler into the mix, is where the real draw of the game is for me. You enter yourself into a particular bracket made up of a handful of superstars and one champ, and battle it out in a series of matches to get your chance at the title. Each of the matches can net you a total of five stars, which you'll gain by excelling at certain categories within the match, such as technical ability, entertainment, and so on. This adds an interesting vibe to each match, so instead of rushing simply to pull of your special and go for the pin, you now have a reason to make the matches interesting and varied, and you're actually rewarded for doing so. This mode also has a slight RPG element to it, in that after the end of each match you'll get a small attribute boost, making your user created wrestler a little stronger each time, adding a certain sense of realism to the quest for the belt.

Visually the wrestlers look as impressive as ever, and while they still seem to lumber about the ring like before, the animations are mostly spot on, and the faces look exceptional in my opinion. The ring designs are great and taken right from their respective shows, and the event matches, like Royal Rumble and Wrestlemania, all have big, over the top displays and a general feeling of being in the big events that's captured well within the game.

And like I said earlier, the ring announcing sounds a lot better this year, far less repetitive, and definitely more enthused and in line with the show. It's not quite as exciting and you don't hear J.R. go off on crazy tangents too often, but it's still better than what we got last year, and I'll happily take the improvement.

The Create A Superstar mode is still one of the best aspects about this series, and this year doesn't disappoint in the slightest. There's a myriad of options, not only in body types, faces, and moves, but with the clothing options as well. Talented creators will be able to recreate just about anyone they want in game, and putting your creations thru the main career mode is always a lot of fun.

Hit boxes and contacts are pretty spot on as well, outside of some slight misses when you're not standing in or near the correct spot for throws and grapples, and of course you're still going to have trouble interrupting the animations of other wrestlers when you're in a tag match or a free for all situation. That's been an issue with wrestling titles since as long as I can remember, and it's still a minor annoyance here. Also, the fighting styles from last year have been thrown out and replaced with a slight bonus system that offers up minimal enhancements to each character. They're pretty specific, and the ones that I tried out all seemed to fit the characters. There's a pretty good range of abilities too, which helps to keep each superstar diverse even with the absence of the fighting styles.

There's plenty of game types both online and off, and while the online mode only supports up to 4 players, you can play offline with 6 or participate in a Royal Rumble scenario. Online seemed to have a bit of lag when I tried it out a few times, and while I think part of that has to do with my connection, I did have other users complaining about previous lag issues too, so take that into consideration. Still, the online mode is quite a bit of fun, if for no other reason than seeing all the strange concoctions that people come up with for their CAW's.

The AI is pretty good for the most part this season, but the basic one on one matches are still pretty easy. However, tag team partner AI is definitely improved, with your partner actually less willing to risk it all and often times tagging you in when they start to take a beating, making it less likely that you'll need to go it alone during a match to insure you don't lose because of your partner. Even three or four way matches don't seem viciously unbalanced, with every AI opponent dishing out the attacks to a more or less equal length, and while they will occasionally gang up on one person, it's not too difficult to deal with. Still, the best challenge in the game comes from playing against actual people, but for the most part the single player experience feels pretty good.

I definitely enjoyed this year's version of the Smackdown vs. Raw series, but I still think that it's time for a serious change of pace. While they've managed to successfully cut out a lot of the filler from the past couple years that have bogged the experience down and made it almost inaccessible to newcomers, the core gameplay still feels pretty identical to what we've been playing since 2005. I'm definitely glad to see the changes they've implemented, but I feel like more needs to be done to really breathe some life back into the franchise. Still, for the fans out there, this is definitely one of the best versions we've seen on the current consoles, and definitely worth checking out for the yearly update.