It’s a shame that UFC Undisputed has come to the fore at the same time as EA’s similar, and unfortunately better, Fight Night Round 4. The brilliant boxing title is just round the corner and many of you have wondering if you should hold on to your pennies for Fight Night or indulge in THQ’s rather formidable contender. In some cases it’s a split decision, in others, FNR4 has the edge. It’s a close run thing if we’re being honest, and is not as clear cut as the ones you get under your eye after being repeatedly battered.
The first thing that UFC Undisputed does is ask whether you want to complete the tutorial. Now we can’t stress enough how much you should take advantage of this offer, as the game is almost impossible to play without it. Sure, you might get somewhere button mashing for a bit, but soon, as the difficulty ramps up, so does the quality and ingenuity of your opponent. This means that you’ll eventually end up revisiting the tutorial several times anyway.
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| This hurts. |
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This hurts even more. |
You actually get an achievement for completing the tutorial and my God do you ever need one. The list of things you have to remember is endless. Overwhelming so. It took us about one hour or more just to get through it and we simply couldn’t remember half of what we’d learned when it came to a close. The other problem is that if you want to reach the top - win the championship in career mode with your chosen, customised character - then you’re going to need pretty much all of them. This game is for those with a serious amount of stamina and patience which is perhaps a decent analogy for the sport itself.
When you finally get into the octagon for a good old scrap, you’ll most likely find that all you need is to throw a few well-timed punches and kicks and the first ten opponents will fall by the wayside. As mentioned earlier however, navigating your way through the top ten is something else entirely. The opponents don’t necessarily become harder in the sense that they can take more punishment, but they can certainly dish it out, and in a varying number of ways too. You’ll meet judo experts, wrestling, power punchers and kickers, oh and out and out boxers too. This wouldn’t be a problem if you could remember all the moves, but as the game doesn’t encourage you to win by any other means than punching someone repeatedly in the head up until this point, it’s almost as though you have to relearn the game again, maybe even retire your fighter and start from scratch as you’ve most likely tailored your character’s strengths and weaknesses around a certain style, i.e. a boxer. So all of a sudden it’s seriously back to the drawing board and you saying hello to lots of frustration.
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| Lots of moves to learn, lots of counters too. |
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Knee, meet face. |
The aforementioned training sessions are equally confusing and again, far too varied. You can improve the stats of your fighter by either generically training with no user input, sparring and manually adjusting the myriad of stats, or by employing a trainer who shows you a few new moves, then puts you in the sparring ring with certain tasks you need to perform. For each task completed you gain points, the more points you gain, the more you will level up and then be able to learn more advanced moves. There’s simply too much here. A simple training session with instant yet gradual results would have sufficed.
The presentation is excellent, on part with EA’s finest: the physics and movement superb. You really get a feel for the action and just how brutal the sport really is. The character models really do resemble their real life counterparts, and the superficial damage looks agonisingly real. We remember being sat upon after being wrestled to the ground by an opponent, our character punched him so many times in the face his blood was dripping on our chest. The blood remained there for the rest of the fight, running down to our stomach. Awesome.
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| There are different fighting styles to choose from. |
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“The lovely Edith,” apparently. |
The sound is just background noise really. The raucous rawk music going on in the background gives the game the edge it's looking for, but after a while, hearing grown men make music like an angry teenager just isn’t really our thing unfortunately. Luckily you have a customisable soundtrack option. A more of a mixed bag would have elevated the game somewhat we reckon instead of just thrashing guitars and screaming idiots. But there you go.
UFC Undisputed is a very good game. In fact, there’s too much game here for us. It’s simply trying too hard to be the Jack of all trades but ends up being the master of none. In Fight Night, you’ve got about 16 moves total to learn, and then it’s all down to how and when you apply what you’ve learned. With UFC Undisputed there are about fifty, and you need to have them all at your disposal if you want to progress in the game’s career mode. However, hopefully this is the start of a new franchise as if the fat is cut away, there’s an engaging tactical fighter out there that could well carve out a niche for itself and perhaps at the same time elevate the popularity of the sport. More of this sort of thing please.
Top game moment: A forty second knock-out.
