The most common question you'll be asking when playing this game will be "Why?"
I went home and found out why.
First and foremost, there are only five match types in the entire game. One on one, Two on Two, Hardcore, Triple Threat, and the KO match. This extreme lack of modes is just plain insulting for Wii owners. With a game series that prides itself on releasing more and more match types every year, it's a complete and utter shock that they would put out such a bare bones list such as this one.
There's also some weird things missing here and there. This is most apparent in the Create-A-Wrestler (CAW) mode. The mode itself is your basic Smackdown series mode, filled to the brim with everything to customize your wrestler from pants and jackets to changing his facial features down to where the eyes are looking, so if you ever wanted to create a wrestler that looks like a horse recently kicked his face in, you can do it. However, there's a couple things missing that's in the other versions of the game. First, you can't put letters on your wrestler. Want to write your name on your warm up jacket? Too bad.
The other weird thing is that you can't preview your entrance options. That's right, you can't look at your entrance animation, video, or music before your wrestler hits the ring. So if you want to know how "Superstar 9" looks with the song "Music 5", you'll have to save your wrestler, go to a match, watch the entrance, finish the match (You can't pause and quit), and then go back into the create-a-moveset mode to change that animation to "Superstar 10". For people like me who loves to create his own wrestlers, this is a complete mode breaker for me. This is something that's been in Smackdown games since it's been on the PS2, but doesn't seem to make it to the Wii. You can still preview your moves by hitting Z, which makes this oversight even stranger. It turns creating the perfect CAW into an incredibly time consuming task. Oh, by the way, there is no advanced entrance creation here. You can only choose the preset stuff.
Okay, now that I'm done ranting on the CAW, it's time to talk about the wrestling itself. Instead of going by the limb damage meter of the other versions, the Wii game opts for a fighting genre life bar. Get it into yellow and perform your favorite move. Get it into red and perform your finisher. Pin. Rinse, lather, repeat. There's very little strategy here to be had here, which means your little brother waving the Wii-mote wildly could probably have a shot at winning. However, it's actually a surprisingly fun mode. The life bar can me used more like what the past Smackdown games called a stamina meter since your taunts raise your life back up. Opponent's last elbow drop put you into yellow? Roll out of the ring and taunt to recoup some health, just like a real wrestler. This faster paced arcade action is something that I hope they continue. As it stands though with this year's game, the wrestling gets really old really fast. Even being able to do the taunts by holding the C button and moving the controller accordingly can't keep you from yawning your way through the majority of your matches.
The Wiimote IR is relatively spot on for the game since it relies so heavily on the controller motion and not on pin-point accuracy, but there are some trouble spots with how the game translates it sometimes. I had to be careful around the ropes when my opponent was down next to them since the same waggle to get your wrestler to lock in a submission hold could also have you go for a springboard jump off the ropes, which can ground you long enough for your opponent to recover and go on the offensive. I also had some trouble about four hours into my first play session where it seemed to stop registering the left and up motions of the Wiimote, causing me to lose to Carlito. I had to watch him spit apple in my face due to the game failing to translate my motions. That's not cool.
The Main Event mode is incredibly lackluster. I made the mistake of going to ECW for my session, which may have hurt my chances of having fun with this mode. There are some nice things about this mode like being able to pick and choose your matches and create your own rivalries and alliances is done well, but with this version of the game it's really a bit pointless since the wrestling gets boring really quickly. There's really very little to do in this mode and getting challenges from the same people over and over again can get really annoying. Trust me, if I could block William Regal's caller ID, I would have. On a side note, the Power Ranking in the mode is completely useless for gauging your success. I utterly destroyed and bloodied the WWE Champion John Cena, yet he goes up two spots to #1 and I go down five spots. As "Stone Cold" Steve Austin would say, "What?"
The graphics are pretty good for the Wii. It's on par with the PS2, but the other next gen systems completely blow it out of the water. You also still get the seemingly traditional clipping issues of things like hair and ring ropes, along with some other texture issues and a really ugly crowd.
All the things THQ has been pushing so hard for in this year's game (things like Superstar Fighting Styles and the Extreme Rules match) are nowhere to be seen in the Wii version. For anyone who's played the other Smackdown vs Raw games, the Wii version of SvR 2008 is a stripped down wrestling title that shows you all it has to offer in the first hour of playing. If you own any of the other systems the game was released on (Especially the XBox 360 version with it's song importing feature), go for those versions. If you only own a Wii, do yourself a favor and use the backwards compatibility and play a few matches in Day of Reckoning 2. You'll get a far more fulfilling experience that way and and extra $50 bucks to spend on the next WWE Pay Per View.