UFC 2009: Undisputed

Reviewed by:
Gerasimos Manolatos

Price: $59.99

The Skinny: Fight for Octagon supremacy in the Ultimate Fighting Championship's first next-gen game. Choose from over 80 top MMA pugilists or create a fighter and take him from a walk-on punching bag to world champ in Career Mode.

The Good: If you're a fan of the sport, you can come out of hiding: There is finally a mixed martial arts video game that doesn't suck. There was Ultimate Fighting Championship on the Dreamcast which was semi-decent, but that game was based on the old bracket-style UFC pay-per-view cards where weight classes were nonexistent and fighters competed multiple times in one night.

Undisputed is next-gen in terms of the nature of the sport and the expected production values of a fighting game. There are a ton of fighters to choose from (even Tito Ortiz, whom UFC President Dana White labelled a "fuckhead") a wide range of fighting techniques to master, and a thorough adaptation of the organization's pay-per-view and television broadcasts to feast your bloodthirsty eyes on. The fighters themselves are nearly photorealistic and feature progressive damage to their bodies as they get pounded on. Joe Rogen and Mike Goldberg also do a bang-up job commentating individual matches, though their insight becomes quite sparse during your created character's career mode.


The Bad: While a vast improvement over previous attempts at simulating the sport, Undisputed contains a bunch of technical anomalies—phantom punches and absurd amounts of head trauma, to name a couple—that keep the game from achieving superstardom. None of them are real dealbreakers, but there is certainly a lot of room for improvement in subsequent versions. We would've also liked to have been able to customize our fighter a bit more in the career mode as we progressed through it, maybe even having the ability to change weight classes or train our fighter in another discipline than the two you choose at the beginning of the career. There have been a lot of complaints about the game's control system, but while there are three pages of button combinations to study, the learning curve is not as steep as advertised. Expect about 30 minutes of the CPU eating your lunch before getting the hang of it.

Other Modes: Included in the bonus section is a Classic Fights mode, allowing you to recreate some of the organization's most memorable matches and then, if done to task, watching footage from the actual event. Also, if you're not too familiar with the sport, there is a very thorough tutorial mode included and pop-ups sporadically appear with helpful tips. More importantly, there are the Octagon girls.

Buy, Rent, or Disembowel: Buy. This is a fine effort by THQ and Co. at bringing the fastest growing sport to life. While there are some real headscratching moments to bear, the gameplay is so good, it hurts.

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