Fight Night Round 4 Review

Alf Horsley

Not being a huge sports fan, I don’t play many of the annual EA Sports blokefests and I don’t get the impression that I would enjoy them all that much. There are, however, 2 of these franchises that I have played and enjoyed. One of these is golf sim Tiger Woods PGA Tour, the other being boxing sim (or ‘pugilism ‘em up’ as my father branded it) Fight Night, formerly known as Knockout Kings. Not being an annual affair, I jumped at the chance to take the latest in the series, Fight Night Round 4, for a few rounds in the ring.

The main mode of FNR4 is called ‘legacy mode’. In this mode you take a fighter, either of your creation or real world and take him from a start in an amateur tourney up to the big time, holding up to 3 belts and being dubbed ‘The Greatest of All Time Everz’. This mode involves organising your own fights, training up before your fights, simulating your training or playing minigames for a greater game and then, when it comes to the big night, clouting the other bloke in the head or body until he falls over whilst trying to stay on your own two feet. This is where this game shines. It’s an odd thing to say that a boxing game shines when it comes to the boxing, but it does. The system of using the right thumbstick to use your hands, the triggers modifying it from punching to weaving and body punching or blocks really is outstanding and more intuitive that any other fighter on the market. This is just accentuated by the way the game mechanics work, the stamina and health dropping permanently round to round as your boxer tiers, the musculature based physics engine making every punch bend and knock the body the way it would, this is where the game stops being a fighting game and begins to be what its touts itself to be, a true simulator of ‘the sweet science’. The aforementioned legacy mode takes this and throws it in a management game that is not over bearing feels like you’re in charge of the future of your fighter, unlike the ladder system of FNR3, not like a management sim with a boxing minigames, the way that FNR2 seemed to feel. The legacy targets you are presented with within the management element aren’t too taxing and always feel like a logical progression from the last one. However, the ease of the targets is not equal to the ease of the fights, and middle of the road fights ramp up the difficulty for every boxing style apart from perfectly balanced, with speed fighters never being able to land a blow, defensive fighters not being able to do any damage and power punchers like my character taking way too many hits thanks to a relentless AI that can play against any fighter. The realism of the legacy mode is also broken by the appearance of classic boxers such an Muhammad Ali, Lennox Lewis, George Foreman and Iron Mike himself in the rankings, even though they retired years ago and achieving a knockout win over Ali when the calendar says 2009 seems a just touch macabre when removing him from the legacy roster would have been just as easy.

The legacy mode perfectly highlights one of the other features of the game, create a fighter mode. The character creating element of Fight Night Round 4 is an amazing feature, with customisation options being near limitless when it comes to boxer attire, height, weight and look, combined with a functionality to use stored music from the console as an entrance theme this means that your boxer will almost always truly be your individual. One drawback of the looks of your boxer is that in order to emphasise the use of camera functionality to map faces, all other boxers must use a set of 60 preset faces. While you are unlikely to make 60 boxers, there are hundreds within the game, so you may well end up fighting yourself in a shorter or taller form with a slightly different beard or Barnett. The new feature of this outing of Fight Night is the ability to customise the style of your boxer, making him a power puncher or a speed boxer as well as the style that he holds himself. This gives the career and quickplay game a huge amount of variation as you never know which one of the hundreds of style/speed combinations you’ll be facing next, with all of them needing a different approach to be used against them to pick up that all important 10 count or judges decision for the win.

One of the great things about the Fight Night series has always been the graphical prowess and Fight Night Round 4 by no means disappoints. The graphics of this game are nothing short of mind-blowing, with the muscles moving in a realistic way, the facial damage and rippling being dealt with in unbelievable detail. One of the things that makes FNR4 so true to life is the product placement. The placements aren’t ridiculous, as they were in Round 3, and make the game seem like a true boxing simulator, and it’s clear that EA learned their lesson from the backlash that followed FNR3, the ESPN sponsorship especially compliments the nature of the game. The only bad point of the graphical choices of this game I can make is the menu system. The menu system is fine to navigate, but seems to oriented towards the Tyson vs. Ali concept and would have been far more impressive and far more representative of the amazing roster of boxers found on this game.

This game has a double edged sword in its arsenal, however. It has this in the form its audio content. FNR4 has the greatest commentary track of any game I have played, with the seamless naming system meaning that the commentary always sounds as real as it can get without locking the guys up and forcing them to commentate on every match. The sound effects are also of a impressive quality, with every punch, block and grunt sounding so real that you’d think you had ringside seats. However, the soundtrack is a huge letdown. The non-stop hip-hop and rap soundtrack gets annoying fast even for fans of hip-hop and rap due to it not even being good quality music and the same tracks playing repeatedly with only 1 track being of a vaguely non-rap genre. But the biggest audio annoyance comes when connected to the internet. While connected to the internet, FNR4 likes to keep you updated with all the latest American sports news via ESPN talk radio. This means that if you’re surfing the menus when something new happens in the world of football, baseball or basketball you get it blaring out of your speakers. While this is fine for fans of American sports, for people who don’t want this, it’s tough, there is no option to turn this particular feature off at all.

While multiplayer is only a small feature on FN, it is an admirable feature. The online has a ranking system that adds depth and keeps coming back, and the connection, usually a major problem in online fighters, is almost always smooth. This game truly shines locally though, and there’s little that is more fun than getting some friends together and playing winner-stays slogfests, and FNR4 really makes it easy with an intuitive multiplayer menu and seamless new-boxer rematches.

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