Fight Night Round 4

Reviewed by:
Gerasimos Manolatos

Price: $59.99

The Skinny: We're barely past the halfway point of 2009, but there are so many titles based on human beatdowns on the market you'd think Chris Brown was on staff at every major video game studio. Nevertheless, only a few can wiggle their way past the riff-raff and take their rightful places at the top of the heap and Fight Night Round 4 does just that. It is, in our opinion, the undisputed champion. With 48 licensed fighters—including legendary pugilists and cover athletes Mike Tyson and Muhammad Ali—and the ability to literally get you, as EA Sports' famed slogan says, "in the game," punching your friend in his pixelface never felt so good.

The Good: First thing's first: The game's create-a-fighter is good. Scary good. Not only can you mold your own wild and wacky creations to your liking, but you can plug in a PlayStation Eye or Xbox Vision camera and input photos of your own face. The process is seamless and the results are accurate enough to make you think you can actually take up boxing. (You can't. Don't even try it at home.) After you finish making your virtual self, you'll be able to either enter the ring through a career mode—dubbed Legacy Mode—fight in a quick match, or play against others online. If you like your sanity, stick with the career for the first few times around, at least to get used to the controls which have been changed up a bit.

The best addition is total control punching, which turns your right analog stick into a lean, mean, face-altering machine. All you do is move the stick to perform punches—for example, tilting it up executes a jab (diagonally left or right controls which hand delivers the punch), a hadouken-like gesture executes a uppercut to your opponent's gut, and a half-circle turn is an uppercut to their face. It all works well, especially when in combination with bobbing and weaving. You progress through career by winning (duh!) and training your guy until he finally gets too old to fight.



The point is to retire with the moniker of "Greatest of All-Time," done by participating in at least 50 bouts, garnering a 90 percent win rating, and holding all three of the game's championship belts. Gee, all of that sounds like real boxing. Well, that's because we've never played a game that nails the sweet science down cold like FNR4. Even if the last fight you saw was a Mike Tyson bout in 1997, you're going to have a lot of fun training yourself to win fights, whether it's by decision of by a ferocious knockout.

The Bad: You progress through Legacy Mode by booking fights, setting up training sessions to pump up your stats, and then competing in the actual matches. Only thing is that your performance during spar sessions—broken up into six different minigames—determines how much your fighter is able to bump up his stats from the maximum allowable. (i.e. Get a respectable "contender" rating and you'll only be given about 50 percent of the amount you'd get from a "champion" rating.) You'll also have to juggle which ones to do each week because training for power in your right hand punches, for example, will yield a small decrease in your stamina rating. We opted to go with "auto-train" the whole time—an automatic 50 percent cut of the stats pie—and we didn't have any issue with difficulty. In other words, the whole shebang seems like a tacked on measure by developers to make you think you're "progressing" through something, but you're really going around in circles a bit.

Cheater, Cheater, Pumpking Eater: There are achievements and trophies which can only be unlocked by playing or winning a certain amount of "Fight Now" bouts. To get them easily, all you have to do is fire up a match and win the first round. Then, press the Start button and select the Rematch option. It'll record the previous fight as a win for you (provided you were winning on the score cards). S'nice!

Buy, Rent, or Disembowel: Buy it. You don't have to endure Don King to play and enjoy this one.

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