Legacy Mode
The Legacy (career) mode was really where I hoped to stay most of the time, but the whole system is flawed to the point of being less fun than I had in Round 3's barebones career mode. Yes, there's more detail to the fighter's career now, where you have an actual calendar and real boxer rankings and you get to choose your fight date, but for the most part you're still taking turns doing one training session and one fight, and the calendar and schedule make little sense. Every once in a while early on you can pick a fight date far enough in the future to do two training sessions before fight, but that's rare. Also, the game seeds in the real, licensed boxers to the ranks, but some of them are ranked down to about 30 in the ranks or so out of 50, and unlike your fighter who's building his skills up, they have their full strength all the time. So you might fight a guy with a 68 overall rating as your 12th fight and have a tough time with, say, a 69 rating on your own fighter, but then Tommy Morrison comes along with his 89 rating, challenges you specifically, and will wipe the floor with you because every punch he throws is so much more powerful than your fighter can take. And this happens whether you create your own boxer or choose to recreate one of the licensed boxers' careers.
Beyond that, the six mini-games included here are generally pretty tough to do, and my first try on most of them would only net me maybe a one or two point increase in total (which doesn't even increase my overall rating by one) when getting a good score would net you closer to fifteen. Sure, you can press the auto-train button, but it gives you half of the the maximum points points possible, and if you keep doing that, you never learn how to train. Luckily, the game does include the ability to practice the training games straight from the main menu (buried in there somewhere) so you can get good at all six of them before starting Legacy mode. At least two of them are real sparring sessions with boxers, and for the most part all six do teach the player a few skills that can be used in the ring, but to maximize the numbers, you'll need a lot of practice before ever starting the Legacy mode.
But none of this solves the problem of the career mode being a huge source of frustration. The AI fighter profiles are good and the boxing itself looks great, but the counter system, annoying training mini-games, and uneven fighter strength when taking on the real-life licensed boxers really saps the fun out of the career mode after the first ten or so fights. There are flashes of great challenge and satisfying outcomes in there, but once you get a ways into the Legacy mode, they're too few and far between to make it worth suffering through the more aggravating fights.
