Played on:
Xbox
EA did a great job with last year's Fight Night 2004. It was the first step towards a revival of the boxing genre, with plenty of licensed fighters and great action. It hinted at bringing boxing games back to a state where the player must use tactics, controlled combinations, and defense as well as offense. It was a breath of fresh air compared to the many button-masher boxing titles over the last years (some of were made by EA themselves).
You'd think that Fight Night Round Two, they'd continue moving in that direction. But sadly, they haven't, as this feels more like an EA Sports BIG title. That is, it's gone way over the top and is all about huge power punches and way too much of an in-your-face style. Sure, EA has fixed many of the issues and drawbacks in the first Fight Night, and this year's game is a hell of a lot of fun, but it's simply not a boxing sim.
The visuals this time around have been improved subtly, but these changes wind up having a great effect. The arenas and other venues you'll fight in cover a wider range of environments, and the crowd - while still blocky and choppy - is far better than what we've seen in just about every sports game out there. Slow motion effects during the game's "knockdown moments" look nearly perfect, and the ragdoll physics for those who are about to meet the mat look much better this year. The boxers' limbs will still flop around unnaturally, and many real boxing knockdowns (where boxers only go to one knee, or simply fall against the ropes and get a standing eight-count) are still not shown here. The visceral thrill of continuing to punch your opponent after his legs have turned to Jello is still here, and this is one place where a lack of realism really is fun.
There's no doubting that EA's made a sincere effort to add new features and fix old problems. The career mode will let you pick the training you want to adjust your stats, and will also allow you to buy gear that can increase your stats. The problem is that the three types of training you can do are pretty unbalanced; the very easy heavy bag event increases seven of your eight stats by a decent amount, while the other two are more difficult to complete and give you fewer stats when all are totalled up. The gear you can buy, like trunks, shoes, gloves, mouthguard, all add to your stats, but there are few real choices you can make here. Obviously, you'd want the mouthguard that gives you +5 to your chin stat over the one that's +3 - there are no disadvantages to take into account, and before long, you'll have far more than enough money to easily buy any equipment that you've unlocked.
What's a bit better is the temporary stuff you can purchase before a fight. You can hire different girls to be part of your entourage, which will allow you to get up more easily from knockdowns and the like. You can pick up different trainers that give you different bonuses in the fight, as well as better cutmen that make the between-rounds fixing up of your boxer's face more effective. You won't be able to afford all of this stuff before every fight, so you'll need to learn to do without the expensive power-based trainer or the cutman that focuses on cuts more than swelling. Of course, once you get into the top twenty on the rankings, the prize money for each fight easily covers whatever you want to buy. Sadly, the rest of the money you make just sits there doing nothing.
The cutman is a rather unique new feature where you'll get the chance to play what is basically a mini-game to bring down the swelling and clear up any cuts on your fighter's face, and you'll need to do this between every round in all professional fights. This system also shows off FNR2's brilliant facial modelling that really brings the game to life from a visual perspective (the slow-motion replays of knockdown punches highlight the facial deformation from the impact of a huge punch as well). Sadly, the cutman mini-game isn't anything particularly engaging - you just pick cuts or swelling, then choose between one of four quadrants of the face to "heal" and swing the right analog stick around to match a litle timed prompter. As with training, you can have the game do it for you automatically, but the game does a crappy job (much like what we saw in training). Frankly, these minigames get incredibly dull quickly, so it's disappointing to know that having the game do these things for you will wind up with a sub-par result.
I'm a little miffed at how your boxer will stand directly over your opponent after a knockdown and taunt him for a while before making an effort to go to a neutral corner. But it's the fact that there are only a few of these animations - including a really goofy "I'm digging your grave, you lose" kind of thing - in total that really make them tiresome. It's a crass display and would probably result in point deductions if this were real boxing (much like the punching when someone's on the way to the canvas, but at least that part looks unique every time). It seems to be part of the developers' attempt show how abrasive boxers should be, how many rules they should break, or "hard-hitting" or whatever they think boxing should be. It doesn't belong, and I think the game loses something by the presence of elements like this.
That leads me to another issue some had with the first game, where once you got knocked down, you'd have to use the analog sticks to align the images of the referee. It was really goofy, and now they've added some visual indicators that you'll be lining up instead. It works much better, but I still feel like I shouldn't lose a fight because I suck at some mini-game that has nothing to do with boxing. Again, you can turn off this thing altogether and let the game decide for itself whether you get up or not, but it also seems to do a terrible job just like the automatic cutmen and training features.
Middleweight champ Bernard Hopkins is the guy on the cover this time around, and while that means little for the actual game, as a boxer he's displayed a tough yet likable personality. Roy Jones Jr., who was on last year's cover, fell to the dreaded EA Sports cover curse last year in a knockout by Antonio Tarver - I truly hope that Hopkins can avoid that. Either way, it's interesting that they went ahead with a middleweight champ rather than a heavyweight or a light heavyweight, and I think this is evidence that the lighter weight classes are finally being recognized by the world as being just as exciting as the heavyweights. Ok, on to the game again.
FNR2's enhanced career mode will allow you to do quite a few more things with your boxer this time around. You'll start off as an amateur, with their own rules: headgear is used (although this is merely for show, as it has no effect on gameplay that I could see), there are no cutmen, and rounds are two minutes long. You can go professional whenever you want, or you can stay for up to ten fights in the amateur ranks and try to win an amateur title. Once you go pro, things open up a bit. Not only will you get to start choosing between the game's three training options, you will also be able to pick your fights based on the preparation time. This is important when planning your boxer's career out, as you might want to do more fights per year to train more and maybe spend longer as the champ. The problem is that unlike the real boxing world, there doesn't seem to be any disadvantage to doing a fight every four weeks or so, although as you get closer to the top spot, the time between fights does spread out no matter what. At least the game doesn't automatically retire your boxer at a certain age; it'll just become increasingly harder to maintain your stats as you age.
EA included some new special fights you can participate in. These are called "hard hits" fights which are modelled after the very old days of boxing - a round isn't over until one fighter is knocked down, and you'll go for fifteen grueling rounds if no one is knocked out by then (and from my experience, very few of these fights go the distance). There are no points to be decided at the end of these fights; the boxer that scored the most knockdowns wins. These fights are a lot of fun, as no one can be saved from a knockdown just because the round's over. Win these fights, and the game will open up new areas of the store to buy better stuff from. The best part is that these unlocked items stay available even if you start a new career.
Once you win a championship belt, you can start fighting for other belts as well. You can go up or down one weight class in order to do this, and while you can switch weight classes before you win a belt, it seems to be better off to wait until you get to the top. You can wind up winning so many belts that you're stuck in an endless cycle of defending them, with no opportunities to do any "fun" fights. Your AI opponents at that level, even on medium difficulty, will do massive combinations and defend themselves extremely well; you'll really need to be good at the game to win decisively to hold onto five championship belts at once.
