Played on:
Xbox 360
Boxing games are difficult to make. I've had a long history with them myself, lamenting the success of button-mashers and enjoying the smarter ones over the last twenty plus years. EA, the king of sports games, has not had a terrible amount of success in the boxing genre, but they've been refining their formula for years now. Their Knockout Kings series had little merit and wound up being all-around crappy boxing games, but they've restarted with Fight Night and put a bigger focus on strategy over the last few years. Fight Night Round 3 is EA's biggest boxing title to date, with incredible visuals, perfectly animated punches, and the best presentation yet (mostly thanks to the graphics horsepower that can be leveraged with the Xbox 360). But is the boxing any good, and does it actually resemble anything similar to real boxing? The answers to those questions, respectively, are yes and no, but it turns out that it still makes for a very, very fun game. Let's dive in and explore why.
Fight Night Round 3 puts you in the ring as either one of dozens of legendary boxers from today and from the past, or as a fighter that you painstakingly create by molding the face, choosing skin tone, facial hair, and other bits and pieces. You can take these characters online in some Xbox Live matches, do some arcade-style Hard Hits fights (where the rounds are untimed, and a single knockdown finishes a round - the one with the most knockdowns wins!), a quick match, or the career mode. It seems like most will be doing the career and Xbox Live modes, and this is where EA has put a large majority of their effort.
Last year's iteration in the series had a pretty functional career mode, although the AI was weak and easily exploited. You'd move up in rank as you fought, and used its weak and unbalanced training system to raise your boxer's stats. And while the training modes this year are much better balanced, the AI is still just as crappy as ever. Once you get some practice in, even the hardest difficulty level is still somewhat easy.
But let's talk a bit about the actual boxing. Just like last year, the left stick controls the movement of the boxer (while holding the left trigger and moving the left stick leans you away from punches), and the right stick is used to throw the game's many types of punches. Holding the right trigger and moving the right stick will allow you to block or parry your opponent's punches - pulling the stick up blocks your head, and down blocks the body. Additionally, if you pull the right stick into one of four diagonals, you're set up for a parry: when a punch arrives, if it's in the "corner" that you're parrying in, you'll throw the opponent's punch aside completely and get basically one free hit. If you can score a big punch after a parry, it's going to do big damage to the opponent.
Unlike Fight Night Round 2, Round 3 includes actual effective jabs which will generally work well in taking all the zing out of your opponent's punches, and in making his power punches stop right in their tracks. Hooks and uppercuts serve their own purpose as the middle of the road in punching power (when compared against speed). EA has also reduced the power of the haymaker punches by making them tire you out much faster, and slowing them down a bit.
But the new punches in Round 3 are really interesting. The Stun and KO punches require you to really pull back far on the right stick, well beyond what a haymaker requires, and the resulting punch is hugely powerful but incredibly slow. It's actually effective if you can lean away from an incoming power punch and answer with something this big, but the problem I have is that in the hands of an experienced boxer, either one of these will put will instantly put someone into a state where a couple more weak punches will put them down. With the HUD turned on, one can see just how powerful these things are, and it seems to me like it's just a bit too much.
As the player goes through the career mode, there will be training to be done, contracts for fights to be signed, gear to be bought, and popularity to be kept up. Round 3 has gotten rid of the ranking system entirely in favor of a popularity system. Boxing freaks will likely hate this decision, but once one considers just how crazy the real-world ranking system is, I don't see this being any worse. Truly, it's a pretty decent system that works in ways similar to how ranking does, but there's just no actual number attached to the various boxers out there. And in this way, EA can also enable one of its big features this year: rivalries.
