First Impression: WWE Smackdown VS RAW 2007

When you set the goal of releasing a game every year from the same franchise, sooner or later your gonna run out of ideas of ways to improve the game series from the previous year. WWE Smackdown VS RAW 2007 could just be an example of that.

So what's new?
- A huge roster of wrestlers, divas & legends to choose from.
- A new control setup.
- You can now fight into the audience.

What's bad?
- Roster doesn't feel up to date due to numerous firings and releases by WWE during the production time of the game. A lot of favorites are still missing, like Paul London & Brian Kendrick, the current WWE Tag Champions! And yet jobbers like Snitszky are still in the game.
- The new control scheme makes the game HARDER to play, and the timing for counters has been changed and doesn't help matters any. The CPU will counter your strong grapples 9 times out of 10, leaving the moves useless and you just rely on the quick weaker grapples and strikes.
- You can actually MISS moves like STOMPING a down opponent when they are right in front of you, and even when you connect, you just don't feel any impact from it, like your kicking air.
- Reportedly, over 200 moves taken out of the CAW mode! And it's not duplicate moves like all the clothesline and DDT variations, but individual moves like the Ki Krusher and the Death Valley Driver!
- They removed the Slobber Knocker match!
- Divas still can't take part in matches with more than 4 people, or gimmick matches either.
- When you play as a tag team, only the first member of the team is announced. There are a whole lot of audio bugs and glitches, like the announce team mis-calling moves and talking about things that have nothing to do with the match. Than again, that might be accurate to the current WWE TV product?

I haven't really played a whole lot of this game, mostly due to not being into the new control scheme and the fact that it's just not as fun as the previous games because of it. The main complaint about fans of the game stems from the game mostly having cosmetic improvements, and nothing to really fix all the previous complaints of the game series. I would gladly give up the good looking graphics for better gameplay, am I right people?
I might review it in a few months if I get around to playing it some more.