WWE Raw 2: Ruthless Aggression

Raw 2 is a great game to play and provides you with hours and hours of entertainment. Before I start with the good parts of the game, i'll do the bad things.

Interference in Season. Why is it your enemies attack your opponents and not you when they interfere? A little bug somebody in Anchor missed. PLus, if you have a title shot and someone interferes, and you go on to win the match, then they win the belt, not you. Also, getting the belt in a ladder match can be a pain and you cna be hanging from it for a fair bit if you don't know what you're doing.

Now with that out of the way, the good stuff, firstly the "Create" part of the game.

Create - an - entrance. This is amazing, you can practically do anything you want to the entrance of your CAW or you can alter the entrances of the current superstars in the game. You can alter lights, phyro, what time lights come on, what colour they are, if fog appears etc... It's a great feature.

The ability to use your own music. This has to be one of the best features of a game ever, you can copy your favourite music from your CD's onto your Xbox which you can then use as an entrance theme for any superstar or CAW. It's great as you can keep their Entrance themes up to date when they change them.

Create - a - superstar. A little frustrating at times but is really good, you can use any attire that the superstars in the game have as well as creatign your own mixtures. You can also use WWE shirts of your favourite superstars which is a nice touch, like I use Jericho's "King Of The World" shirt for my CAW and just gives a nice touch of realism. Also a good thing is you can alter the costume of the superstars in the game already, unlike in the Smackdown series. You can't however alter their heads or faces.

Season mode. This is the only way to unlock the superstar pre-made attires for you to use for youer CAW in Create mode, it's also they only way to unlock the Movies for Theatre mode. To do so you must Steal from another Superstar of your choosing. To unlock everything that superstar has you need to steal from them 3 times succesfully, doing that to each superstar will take a while so there's plenty or replay value and incentive to play more. Also in season you can control who you are feuding with and who you are friends with. To make feuds you need to suprise attack, call out or set a trap on people. To gain friends, you need to encourage a superstar of your choosing. If you get a Diva in your allies list, and they like you enough then you get random dates which is a nice touch.

The gameplay itself. This does confuse people at first, and confused me. The first hour or so I played the game I hated it, to me it was pure garbage but as I played more and got used to how the game plays and such, I started to love the game. Once you know what you are doing then you will like this game. This is tha main reason most people hate the game, they rent it and only play for half an hour or so, these people you should ignore because to know what a game is truly like you need to play for a good few hours. The game plays at the same speed as you see in real life WWE T.V so when people say the game is slow, they have grown up on the Arcade whore Smackdown games which are way too fast to be taken realisticly.

Graphics. Shiny! Some of the superstars just look like they have been sucked under a floor polisher like in the Tom and Jerry cartoons. I'm not sure why, but I guess we'll never know. The worst for this is HBK. Most of the sueprstars look really good and realistic.

Sound. Could have been better, crowd only start to really cheer once you do a big mvoe, once the move has ended the stay quiet again. Even when you win they stay quiet. Besides those flaws, the sound overall is really good, turning up the volume on your T.V and blasting out a couple of your entrance themes in CAW sounds really good.

Overall. It's a great game and is well worth your money and ivestment in an Xbox if you don't already have one. If you get this game and don't like it, give it time, it gets a lot better the more you get used to it. Now, you may be asking why? Well I can tell you that I am a PS2 fanboy so if I like this Xbox game then you know it has to be good. It's one of the best games I have bought all year.