“Fight Night Champion” may be the best unwitting ad campaign boxing gyms could hope for. With incredible attention to detail, it conveys the drama and sheer physical test of the sport as well as any movie, but vague controls leave you feeling oddly disconnected from the on-screen battle. The result is a game that, though fun, inspires you less to keep playing it than to search Google Maps for a place where you could get in the ring yourself. Gamers may have the advantage of generally having the same body type as Butterbean — playable here for the first time — but how often does a game have a serious chance of getting people to get physical outside the world of points? The last time this happened was with “Wii Sports Resort’s” Frisbee mode, which made up for middling graphics with realistic gameplay. “Champion” does just the opposite.
“Champion” boasts perhaps the best animation in games today, with flinch-inducing differences between glancing blows and solid hits. Slow-motion replays show everything you might have missed, from punches deflected on opponents’ gloves to flesh rippling upon impact. And, besides odd synchronicity in crowd movements, venues are perfect, whether a chandalier-lit London theater or an open-air ring in Mexico. It says a lot about a game’s attention to detail for you to stop and think about how right an arena’s exit signs look.
The graphics aren’t “Champion’s” only stab at drama. In addition to the regular career mode, there’s now a story mode in which you fight as Andre Bishop, a middleweight who looks like Obama in those shirtless Hawaii photos. The script is penned by “Monster’s Ball” co-writer Will Rokos, who was presumably directed to include the F-word early and often. Who at EA thinks these profanity-filled minimovies are worth being slapped with a rating that will (theoretically) prevent many people from buying their game?
| ‘Fight Night Champion’ |
| » Systems: PS3, Xbox 360 |
| » Price: $59.95 |
| » Rating: 3 out of 5 stars |
It’s the controls, though, that keep “Champion” from being as fun as it should be. “Champion” suffers from what I call the “Virtua Fighter” Problem. Ever since fighting games went 3-D with the release of that arcade game in 1993, there’s been an ambiguity over what should happen when you press up. Should it convey your desire to aim at your opponent’s head, sidestep around your opponent in the direction away from the camera, or jump? In “Champion,” where jumping isn’t a consideration, pressing up or down moves your fighter around the ring, and you have to hold a shoulder button — not down — to communicate that the next punch should be aimed at your opponent’s body.
A possible solution would be a six-button model, in which the top two face buttons are for right- and left-arm punches to your opponent’s head, the bottom two buttons are for right and left body blows, and the shoulder buttons are for uppercuts. But one of the main planks of the “Fight Night” series is portraying the full diversity of punch types. How does it do this? Punching is primarily assigned to the right joystick, with quick flicks in different directions meaning everything from jabs to hooks. Even with improvements over “Fight Night Round 4,” this system is as bizarre as it sounds, and it was only though trial and error that I figured out even how to punch with one or the other arm. Ignoring all finesse and just rotating the joystick in quick circles over and over is disconcertingly effective.
As with many fighting games, the instant replay is the muckraker exposing the true nature of your apparent pugilistic elegance, each punch thrown after your opponent falls a testament to how disconnected you are from your characters’ actual movements. Maybe I’m just bad at this game, or maybe it really is too complicated for its own good.
