Fight Night Round 3

"An Amazing Game, Marred by Design"

To sum up, although the actual boxing part of this game is amazingly fun and rather well done, EVERYTHING else is terrible. Everything. Now, I'm not a sports game fan, and I haven't played any boxing games since George Foreman's Boxing on the Game Gear, or perhaps even Buster Douglass Boxing for Genesis, so this review is not in comparison to anything in particular.

GRAPHICS: 9
This is the type of game that you put on an HDTV to show not only the power of the Xbox 360, but the amazing visual qualities of HDTV. The boxers look amazing and, if you suspend your disbelief, it looks like there's actual people fighting on a video-game background. Sweat beads off of skin true to life, and some of the cuts look real. Instead of looking like video game characters, the created characters look like unusual people.

The part where this section lacks is EVERYWHERE ELSE. The crowd has VERY limited capabilities; there may be two or three different gestures for an audience member to make. On top of this, the card ladies look deformed at times and there are only two or three different kinds of those, too. This wouldn't be such a big issue if you didn't HAVE to see them at some point, or if you could see them throughout the entire match, but you can't. They're only there for a maximum of 30 seconds and don't really do anything but walk around and hold a round card above their head. Seeing that they could make even the created boxers look amazing, they should've been able to do it with the card girls.

GAMEPLAY: 7
Actually boxing against someone else is fantastic fun. The only problem comes with the thing that, for some reason, everyone is raving about. It's this flash-ko punch knockout system. It's one thing to be down in points and come back and whack someone really well to knock them out, but if I've been elbowing a guy in the face for five rounds, punching him in the face, punching him in the stomach, and he's got next-to no life or stamina left and my boxer is at 95%, there's no possible way that this guy is going to take me out. They supposedly added these features for realism, but it only makes me not want to play the online fighting anymore. People exploit these punches and there is little that you can do about it, because it's inevitable that your hands will get sweaty while playing this game, rendering you unable to block for a fraction of a second.

As far as fighting against the computer goes, it's alright. They don't abuse the powerful punches, but it's also irritating because the computer fighters are either too easy, or they block or counter every punch you make and only punch where you're not blocking. I didn't have a problem with this at first, but after playing this game a lot, watching other people play it a lot, and then thinking about it, there's really no way that a human opponent could do this, whether it's in this game or in a real ring.

They really dropped the ball with the knockouts. No matter what kind of punch you throw, the victim falls to the ground as if you've hit him with a baseball bat, and they flop around using last-generation physics. Sometimes it's funny, but it gets very old, very fast. In this videogame, there's no way whatsoever that a fighter can be so drained that he collapses, or is taken down by a jab. There's also no consideration to the way you knocked someone out when the getting up part happens. If you annihilate an opponent with dozens of elbows and groin shots in the first minute of a fight, they can always get up more than once. Even if you knock someone out within 30 seconds of the start with only haymakers, and then knee them in the face as they fall to the mat, they can get up within 3 seconds. If you destroy an opponent for 9 rounds but don't knock them down, the first time you do, they'll get up in 3 seconds. It's obviously video game logic, and that negates the "realism" that they're stressing so much.

GAME DESIGN: 0
This is where the game totally goes overboard with being bad. It's painfully obvious that they should've released this game in the summer. There's almost too much negatives to put into a single review for this single category.

-Saves. This game is horrible with saves. I understand that the Xbox 360 has had problems with game saves, but I played this game after any available updates were installed, and I've played most 360 games without problems. You really can't do anything in this game without having to select a profile or setting profile to save to, and it takes a long time to save or load anything. Not a minute, but this is 2006, and if Ninja Gaiden can save in an instant, and so many other games can do it just behind that time, this next-generation system should do even better. If you go into the options menu, regardless of whether or not you changed any settings, you have to save. The prompt takes about three seconds to come up, it takes about two to register your selection, and it takes another five to save, and then another second or two to confirm that. It doesn't sound like a lot of time, but it adds up quickly since you have to navigate crappy menus which require you to save at virtually every button-press.

-General Loading. This game is horrible with loading, period. There's only one loading screen (which is very bad and is reminiscent of a 1998 Powerpoint presentation), and that comes up whenever you change menus. It takes about five seconds for this screen to go away. For some reason, it takes just as long to load up a training scenario as it does to load a fight, which is about fifteen seconds. Those kinds of loading screens have a wide variety of about five different text hints for the game, or a brief description of some game element. It takes a second or two to change any option or variant in this game. What happened to next-generation speed? Even if you skip everything you can, between rounds is about a half-minute gap.

The biggest loading issue comes with the images in fighter maintenance and creation. While editing your fighter, it takes no less than five seconds to load up the various hairstyles, clothing, etc. I've seen better times from Playstation 1 wrestling games. Even the little “polaroid” photo of your prospective opponent in the contract selection takes over five seconds to load.

-Create a Player. This would be fine if it weren't for the loading, and for the simple fact that I've created over a dozen different fighters and I can only manage to find ONE of them. It takes over ten minutes to create a character for reasons listed above and because when distributing your stats, you have to go from zero up to 100, and it ticks very slowly one at a time. There's no way to speed it up, there's no way to jump ten numbers or anything. C'mon, EA. This controller has twelve buttons; you could've fixed that. It just takes way too long and is either lost due to bad programming or due to my oversight which is not helped by the six-page instruction booklet.

Also, the fighters are very limited in variety. You can change their faces quite a bit, but your guy is either a fat guy, a buff guy, or a scrawny-yet-buff guy. There are many different styles of boxing to choose from, but you can't mix it up.

Also, for some reason, you can't create your own nickname. Adobe Acrobat has a very good function that allows you to make the computer audibly read things on the page. Aside from acronyms it works awesomely, so there's no reason that there couldn't be a similar implement for this game. The nicknames are terrible, too. What kind of boxer's nickname is “Satin” when they don't even have “The Jabber” or “Dirty Boy” or something like that?

There's also no game interaction based on how you fight. I fight dirty; I throw at least three elbows per round. Every single time, though, the announcer is surprised at my elbowing, and this is after 75 wins and no losses.

SOUND: 3
Everything sounds crisp and all that, and the punching sounds nice, but that's it. There are only 14 (or less) musical tracks to accompany the game, and it's on a very bad rotation. The announcer is boring and repetitive and adds nothing to the fight, and you can't turn the announcer off without also turning off the corner, which is also boring, and the countdown. All voices fall under one setting. You can't add your own music through the actual game, and if you add your own music through the system, it will play no matter what is happening, which is annoying. The most disappointing aspect is that you can have the Burger King as your promoter, but his voice sounds like every other (out of a whopping three) trainers, and you can't see him except for in your introduction.

EXTRAS: 0
There are almost none. They have incredibly basic stats for classic fighters, and you can't go into detail about them. You can't go into detail about your own fighter's records; you can't see how many TKOs you've won by. You can't see anything about the way you fought, or the boxers you've defeated. It shows your Win-Loss-Draw record, and that's it. I believe there was more in Buster Douglass Boxing, even, but this is 2006.

You can't replay any matches. I couldn't believe this part. You can't pause the knockout replays, or change the angle of the camera. You can repeat the knockout blow, but it doesn't show the setup, most of the execution, or the following action. There are many different preset camera angles to choose from, but there's two slight variants that aren't really like two different options at all.

OVERALL: 6
This game is a good boxing game, but everything around the fighting is terrible, so only half of the game is good which merits it a half-rating. I've played this game for easily 100 hours and the negative portions just seem to get larger and larger. The thing that bothers me the most is that they are problems that could have, and should have, been fixed prior to the official release. If anything, they could've released another classic matchup over XBox Live and just pushed the date back a little bit. I'm sure that would've been worth the wait.

So why is this game getting amazing reviews? I don't really know. Although the game looks great and is for the most part enjoyable to play, the experience is ruined by amazingly bad game design, and the fact that EA needs to tell us that they made the game at E-V-E-R-Y P-O-S-S-I-B-L-E opportunity.

The attempted realism is only good at first glance, and when you look at the mechanics of the game, it's not so much a boxing simulator as it is a fighting game. People rave about the lack of a display, but this only hurts the game since the visual cues are not constant or reliable.

Buy or Rent? Neither. If you've bought the game, go return it; EA will just continue to make partially good games if you continue to buy them every year. Download the demo on XBox Live; it's got all the great points of this game and very few of the flaws. It's really up to us as consumers to let them know that the small details are important in a game, and really matter to game players. If we continue to give near-perfect scores to less than exactly that, then more almost-good games will come out.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 03/15/06