Fight Night Round 2 Preview
EA did well to keep their faith in boxing games, despite the lackluster Knockout Kings series. With a new name, plenty of new boxers, and a complete redesign of gameplay, Fight Night turned out to be a great boxing game. It had its fair share of flaws, but it brought a skill-based boxing engine into the mainstream. Instead of having you mash buttons (which most boxing games did, turning them into something more like a party game you play with your drinking buddies), you had to defend yourself, stick and move, and counter-attack with the right punch.
All of that's alive here in Fight Night Round Two; I got the chance to screw around with a preview of the PS2 version of the game, and while I still see plenty of room for improvement, this game's quite a bit better than last year's title. I said in my review of the first Fight Night that it singlehandedly revitalized the boxing genre, but that the series has a long way to go. And from what I see here, there is still going to be a long way to go before boxing games are up to the level of realism that other sports games are at.
EA's included several major new features here, although only some of them made it into this very limited demo. You can only play as Bernard Hopkins or Sugar Ray Robinson, and you only get two rounds to use. The game comes with what seems to be a full announcer voice and one song from the soundtrack, and the only options you can configure are volume and controller vibration. Other options seem to be ready for the full game but just disabled in this demo. Career mode, Create-a-boxer, and training have all been left out for this version; we're promised highly improved versions of all three of these major parts of the game, but for now we'll have to take EA on their word. Next is online play: while the PS2 version of Fight Night allowed you to play over the internet, the Xbox version didn't. This year, both games will have online play, and I'm curious as to what EA is cooking up for Xbox Live! support. The GameCube version won't have any online play, but the consolation prize is an emulated version of the Nintendo arcade classic Super Punchout!.
The same hip-hop feel of the first game is retained in Fight Night Round Two - one look at the list of songs going into the soundtrack should put to rest any hope that EA might have decided to broaden the spectrum of music. I'm just as disappointed in this as I was with the first Fight Night, as rap is not the only kind of music that is prevalent in boxing.
This time, EA picked up ESPN and Fox Sports boxing commentator Joe Tessitore, and at first he seems like a much better choice than rap DJ Big Tigger from the first game. But after listening to this guy for about two hours, I'm wondering if this is any real improvement at all. To me, the problem is that no matter how authentic it sounds, it's still lame if there's no back-and-forth between two or more commentators, and as a result the vocabulary becomes very repetitive quickly. I mean, in real boxing matches they have two and even three guys talking about a fight, and EA has spent the cash to get two-person commentary on other EA Sports titles, so I don't see why they can't do it here. Sure, what we get is better than last year, but it's still not nearly as good as I wanted this game's commentating to be.
The announcer also refers to both boxers in this demo as "he", "him", and the like; even Big Tigger in the first game at least knew all the major boxers' names as well as a ton of nicknames for custom-made (or totally made up lower-ranked) boxers. He could also put the names into a sentence perfectly without sounding unnatural. Whether this feature simply wasn't available in time for this year's demo or if EA just don't want to bother at all, I don't know, but I sure hope Tessitore can start naming names in the full game.
But enough of the announcer; let's get on to the boxing. This game seems to turn up the volume to eleven on just about everything in the first Fight Night, whether it's good or bad. You can now defend yourself and punch while on the move; EA's called this "Total Boxing Control". I really don't like the idea that the ability to move while boxing and defending oneself should be touted as something on a feature list, since I see it as a must-have for any boxing simulation. But aside from that, yes, it's there, and it works like you would expect it to.
In Round Two, the same four-corners style of attacking and defending from the first game comes into play. You can "parry" an attack either left or right, head or body. Guess wrong, and you'll eat a big nasty punch. Since you can't control exactly where your gloves go when defending, it comes down to a game of guessing where your opponent's punches will come in, blocking appropriately, and opening up with a combo of your own. I look forward to the day when a boxing game without specific "dodge" or "block" buttons is released, because real boxers are always defending themselves. Fight Night Round Two is not ready for that kind of gameplay yet, and even then I'm not sure it could be possible on current controllers anyway.
You can lean away from punches and put your gloves up at the same time, which is nice - hold down L1 and use the left stick to lean, hold down R1 and use the right stick to "block". It still looks a bit unnatural, but it's a bit better than the first game. Either way, I found it to play a little too much like the Dead or Alive fighting games - the player must learn to predict where a punch is going to come in from and block accordingly. If you don't get it right, you'll pay for it dearly. Waiting and countering (rather than going on your own offensive) seems to be very effective in this game, and I'm not sure I agree that it should be that way.
"Total Punch Control" is back and this time it's more than just an analog stick gimmick. This system lets you swing the right stick in various ways to throw a total of six different punches - left and right, jabs, hooks, and uppercuts. In the first game, the four face buttons on the controller would allow you to throw the punches much faster, with the same power as with the analog stick, and with fewer errors (just press the jab and hook button together for an uppercut). The only advantage I could see with the old TPC was the ability to feint a punch from one side to throw off one's opponent, then let it go and do a different punch. In the end, I decided that TPC in the first game was not worth that extra lag time it would take to set up a power punch
TPC has changed for Round Two, though. Now you can use TPC to set up a punch and pull back on the stick for extra power if you want- then push foward on the stick to throw the punch. This is the Haymaker punch system they've added, and it generates a big effect in the game. The camera will actually shake if the punch connects, and the sound effects are right out of Rocky IV. The presentation here is a little bit overdone, but the point is you'll know for sure when you are hitting with or getting hit by haymakers rather than regular punches. The system seems fairly balanced, as your opponent will be able to see these punches coming pretty easily. The nice part is it allows a losing fighter to turn the tides quickly. In the first Fight Night, if you got way behind on points near the end of the fight, it was pretty much hopeless. Now, you can take a risk and try to score a big win with a few very powerful hits.
Both the PS2 and Xbox versions of the game looked equally great, and this PS2 demo has some new effects and improved visuals as well. The camera now has a focal point during the introduction and between-round cutscenes, which means that things not being focused on are blurred. It looks great, but it seems that the effect is too taxing on the PS2 to do during an actual fight. The boxers already looked great, but now they're even better - the faces are sharper, and the face deformation system means that the slow motion knockouts look spectacular. Your boxer will now take much more realistic damage on his face, including blood that shows up but doesn't constantly flow and drop like it did in the first Fight Night. It still kind of sprays from the big punches, which is pretty unrealistic, but it's much more in check than it was before.
The AI is much smarter in Round Two than it was in Fight Night. The computer opponent can more intelligently stick and move, know when to back away and defend himself, and when to go all-out for the knockout. One problem with the demo I found is that the opponent doesn't really try a slow, jabbing, boxing game - both Hopkins and Robinson, when played against, were going for knockout punches right from the start. This made for a very hard-hitting two rounds, and many knockdowns were seen in those two rounds. I hope that the full game's AI doesn't constantly try this, as it'd make for a pretty poor twelve rounds overall. I can't really say for sure if that's how the full game will be, though, as it could have been tuned this way for the demo, or it could just be the behavior of both of the boxers available in this version. I dread to think that EA might consider a twelve-round fight "too much" for the average gamer - hopefully they haven't tried to adjust the punching power to make sure fights end within the first few rounds or anything like that.
While the first game would fade out the sound when a boxer was in serious trouble and about to be knocked down, it was only an audio effect. Fight Night Round Two waits a bit longer before doing this, but when it does it zooms in on the torsos of both boxers - letting you see the punches hit up-close. And when the knockdown blow hits, the camera seamlessly follows the boxer that's hitting the canvas. The effect almost starts too late, as when that camera zooms in I know that there's only about one punch left before a knockdown. The ragdoll physics that show up when boxers get knocked down seem to be a bit better this time with less of the jiggly jello effect that plagued the first game, but it's still there a little bit. Overall, I'm very impressed with the visuals that have added since Fight Night last year.
In Fight Night, boxers who get knocked down would have to line up blurry images of a referee in order to get up. From what I see in this demo, though, it looks like they removed it altogether. And since there isn't even a referee to be seen during the actual fights, I'm happy to see that annoying "feature" completely gone here. Granted, you could turn it off in the first game, but I'd rather that it'd never been there in the first place.
Now, the game decides for itself whether you'll get up by the count of ten or not based on how you've done in the fight so far. And in my opinion, that's how it should be - no button mashing, no mini-games. All I want is a simple, fair decision as to whether my boxer is capable of getting up in time. From what I see in this demo, that's exactly what we get with this year's game. One rather annoying part is how the boxer who scores a knockdown gets to taunt and strut around a bit before actually going back to his corner, which is completely out of place seeing as this kind of thing would cause boxers to lose points in real life.
The signature punches and illegal punches are still here, and they still have only a small impact on the game overall. Clinching is now in, but the way it works is a bit odd - it seems to be somewhat like a bit of a throwback to grappling in fighting or even the UFC games. Clinching works like this: press up on the d-pad and your boxer will literally grab at your opponent, and if he's close enough, will try and hold on. The other guy can try to get out of it and push you away if he can. Honestly, I'm not sure this is going to work right, although I admit I haven't spent enough time playing the demo to really make that decision. The other thing I wonder about is the announcer's comments regarding clinching; he says that a boxer could lose points if he continues to clinch. Now I've seen my fair share of boxing fights, and I've never seen a fighter lose a point for tying up his opponent's hands in a clinch. It's a perfectly fair part of the game and I'm a bit skeptical as to the realism and overall effect this odd clinching system will have on the game.
There's only so much one can learn from a game that allows a total of six minutes of gameplay before dumping you back to the title screen. EA's cutman feature is missing from this demo, and the fights don't go on long enough for me to really get a good feel of how balanced the gameplay is. I still feel that the Fight Night series is a bit of a hybrid of boxing and fighting games, but when you look at the rest of the competition in the boxing genre, even just a few slight improvements over last year's title puts this game light years ahead of the rest of the pack.
I may sound like I hate every aspect of this game, but I admit that I'm over-critical of boxing games. In fact, I've only really gotten into about four or five over the last 20 years. At least with Round Two, the boxing itself is entertaining in a way that you won't get in a button-mashing boxer, nor will you get it in a vanilla fighting game (whether it's 2D or 3D). It remains to be seen if the enhanced career, training, or online modes promised in the full version will be worth the price tag and the upgrade from last year's title. Fight Night Round Two is set to be released in stores on March 1st (only about eleven months after its predecessor) on the PS2, Xbox, and GameCube.
