A past favorite of mine, boxing games, gave me a feeling of being a bad ass. Wrestling games are good, don’t get me wrong, but they don’t have that raw approach that games like Fight Night had. Thankfully, the developers behind my beloved Fight Night games have been working on a wrestling game that gives the same feeling as those boxing games of yesteryear. EA Sports’ UFC allows scrawny-little me to be a monster in the octagon, much like I was in the boxing ring.
I expected complex controls with EA’s UFC game, and I got that. The game dropped me right into a training course of sorts, running me through the myriad of commands. It was a little overwhelming at first. Awkward transitions, multiple ways to avoid damage, everything was just really confusing. I was afraid this was going to be another Undisputed debacle and I was ready to shut it off.
Then I started a career on easy. This was where the magic happened. After making my fighter (I chose a kickboxer as my starting science, to keep me away from grappling and submissions out of the gate), the game was reintroduced to me at a slower pace. Things started to make sense with repetition, and the “Story” of being an up-and-comer through the reality TV show all felt believable. Between every match, three randomly chosen training events gave me more experience, sometimes in those complicated reversals and ground transitions I was having a troubled time learning.
The career kept me occupied for quite a while, and I loved most of it. But being as it was on easy and I was getting better, it dragged on a little towards the end before I retired as the UFC Heavyweight champ. The beauty of EA Sports UFC over, say, a new Fight Night game, is that when I got bored KO’ing opponents, I had the option to make them tap out. Trying to memorize which position you have to be in to pull in a submission can be a pain to remember, but it’s a satisfying victory.
Career has a few negatives though, too. As much fun as I had, there are little video vignettes that are neat at first but get real old after awhile. Some show UFC action, those were the cool ones. Others showed fighters saying things like, “Hey man, nice win streak!” or “OH, hey, I’ll be backstage at your fight, good luck!”. The second bad thing is an extension of the first, because when I created a new fighter I was bombarded with the same videos: Dana White congratulating me on this, and giving me advice on that. I was inundated with videos that I had to skip. An option for “second career”, without the opening training and videos would have been a much-loved addition.
Of course, while the career path will keep you busy while you get some experience behind you, the real legs of a game like this is going to be the online mode. EA Sports calls this Championship, and splits fighters into skilled brackets. Starting fighters are obviously a white belt, and have a set amount of fights to earn points to advance to the next class. After said-amount of fights, a new “season” begins in either the same tier or next tier (or last tier depending on how bad you may have done). Typical online shenanigans are a given, sadly; rage quiting, random people voice chatting, random lag spikes, spamming the same move over and over, etc. Despite these cons, I’ve had more fun playing online than I have any other fighting game. In a genre where I usually suck playing competitively, the randomness of mixed martial arts makes it so that I can obtain a 17-15 record and feel good about most of the fights I have had.
A nice addition would have been a way to select certain fighters as favorites. Scrolling through the list of fighters got annoying real quick when I had go-to fighters in each weight class. Being able to pin default fighters would have been a time saver. Also missing is an option to select a random fighter. Not that I am that brave, but it’s just a constant I am used to seeing in fighting games of other sorts.
There are a few other sections of the online mode” Rivals to let you take on friends, and Tournaments that I had a hard time getting into. I don’t mean that in the sense that I didn’t enjoy them; but actually getting into a fight was very difficult. Maybe that’s because on Xbox One everyone is playing Championship instead.
Game modes aside, EA Sports UFC just plain looks pretty. Brutal, but pretty. No matter what I was playing, or who I was fighting, some of the collisions between myself and my opponent looked plain nasty. I cringed more than once at how bloody and visceral things look. Every once in a while the frame rate ran a little sluggish, but those instances were few and far between. The fights usually went smooth without a hiccup.
With the Fight Night series being gone so long, EA Sports UFC filled a major gap in the sports genre, providing an effort that I was happy to play. There are a few problems with the title, and UFC falls a bit short of landing a knockout blow, but EA has delivered some solid body shots with this violent and competitive fighting game.
This review was written based on gameplay on the Xbox One, with a review copy provided by the publisher. For more on our review policies, please read here.
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