"A serious contender"

Visual- 9/10

There's no denying it-- this is one sharp looking game. For the first time in video game history, the boxers featured in Fight Night are truly imposing figures. Even the shortest featherweight has real presence, thanks to a healthy polygon budget and a great soft flesh texturing. Gone are the superhero, rippling muscles of the Knockout King series. The boxers' skins are suitably understated. There's no denying their musculature, but they look like real beings of real flesh.

Their animations are superb-- bobbing and weaving has never looked better. The punch animations are great, though a few of the deflection animations can look a little wonky. Occasionally, a punch will go astray, most often if your boxer's punch has been interrupted by a jab, and his joints go loose-- you might think of the infamous Joe Theisman video, but by and large the animations are flawless.

Faces degrade as you would expect as the fight rages-- swelling is induced, cuts appear and flow with blood beneath the eyes or on the bridge of the nose, and the effects are fantastic. Cuts occur often enough to satisfy, but not so often that you see it coming. And to see the cut worsen, and the flow of blood from the eyelid to the jaw increase, well, can be a bit of a rush. The only weak spot here is the squirts of blood that occur when needling a boxer's cut-- it looks rushed, poorly animated. It evaporates midair and leaves no stain on the ring, a minor niggle that detracts a bit from the otherwise stellar realism.

There are a few graphical weak points-- there is no in ring ref, and a few of the arenas, particularly the earlier dives, look poorly designed and a bit blocky. But there are great details abound-- at last , you can fight outdoors in Caesar's Palace. The crowd is fully polygonal, no longer a 2d cutout. In later rounds, you'll see sweat flowing from your fighter's brow. In short, the closer you look, the more you'll find to love.

Gameplay-- 7/10

Though it is not the first game to examine boxing as an art and a science as opposed to a brawl, it has certainly refined the genre and raised the bar a great deal. Don't let anyone tell you this is a button masher. Only on the easiest setting will the game allow you to abuse your power and go for the first round knockout. In Fight Night, you have to work for every blow and conserve every bit of stamina to score knockdowns and win rounds. Sometimes, the work becomes tedious. On higher difficulty settings, the computer becomes highly defensive and has the tendency to cheaply parry most of your shots and run from you in the ring. But all in all, the game is nicely balanced. It rewards thoughtful boxing. Though there is room for the power puncher, the game, as in real life, favors finesse.

A much needed addition to Fight Night's future installments is the inclusion of sliders. While all other EA sports titles have used these, Fight Night, the sport that perhaps stands to gain the most from gameplay alterations, has very few gameplay customization options. Cut frequency, flash knockout frequency, punch power, stamina recovery-- all of these are settings that gamers ought to be able to tweak to their own liking. Perhaps Fight Night 05 will catch on.

The career mode is a bit shallow-- it still consists of fighting a handful of made-up pugilists, then taking your skills to the best of the best. There are nice added features, such as the giving of trophies and awards and year's end. But the mode is fairly shallow-- training still smacks of the old days. To be fair, the fictional boxers were crafted with care-- each has a unique style and each poses a serious challenge to your ranking.

Audio-- 4/10

Yes, it's not all peaches and cream. The game suffers most deeply in the audio department. While the developers tried so successfully to create an atmosphere of realism with its deep create-a-boxer, its excellent animations and boxer models, and its merciless, brutal gameplay, they evidently tried to appeal to a second demographic with the inclusion if MC Big Tigga, who functions as both ring announcer and commentator. His commentary is terrible and runs on a very short loop. Turning speech off will shut him up, but you'll also be deprived of the referee's counting and your cornerman's advice. This is no huge loss-- the referee sounds like he's missing a chromosome, and your cornerman's dialogue is equally limited-- but it's a weak gap none the less.

In addition, the game's soundtrack is limited to hip hop, something that I imagine will irritate fans of the Hispanic and European fighters, who usually enter to non-hip-hop music. Turning it off will make menu navigation a little easier to take, but the trade-off is that your boxer will enter to stone silence. A little variety would have been nice, is all.

In ring sounds are good-- punches sound appropriately realistic, and boxers will grunt as their stamina diminishes. The only in-ring complaint I have is the deafening effect which takes place as a boxer nears knockdown-- it's a novel concept at first, but the novelty wears off quickly and becomes a distraction afterwards.

Control-- 7/10

Let's face it-- total Punch Control works, and it works well. But it's not the revolution EA makes it out to be. It's essentially a more complicated way to throw punches than by cueing them with button presses. The stick does not determine the power behind your punches, or the speed of your punches, only which punches you throw. You can feint, though this rarely scores you a blow. You can be successful playing the game with TPC, or with the buttons. Granted, TPC does add a flare of interactivity, but don't feel bad if you get stymied by it.

The boxers are quick to respond to commands. Parrying blows is difficult, and it will take you a few beatings to get the hang of it. But once you do, you'll realize what a step up it is from the days of simply blocking low and blocking high.

Overall-- 8/10

A great game with some room for improvement. It looks great and plays great. It's just unfortunate that it doesn't have the depth of options provided by EA's other titles, namely Madden and MVP. It's a mystery why they skimped on the features-- a part of me feels like Ea was trying to appeal both to the EA and EA Big demographics, though the duplicity weakens the game. All in all, Fight Night is certainly the finest boxing game yet made, and it will be exciting to see where the franchise is headed.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 04/08/04