UFC Undisputably kicks a large amount of butt.
Pros
- Fights take a certain level of tactics to win. Button mashing will only get you so far if you're not great at the ground game and knowing where you need to be to do this or how to keep your foe from doing that.
- Huge roster.
- Decent visuals.
Cons
- Single player is a bit crap.
- Some animation problems.
- No cross profile create-a-fighter fights.
I'm generally not a sports person, but I don't mind UFC.
If I'm fortunate enough to catch it on the TV I will and in the past I have been known to rent DVDs and watch guys clobber each other. Now I can take part with UFC 09 and I'd say it does a pretty reasonable job of simulating the sport.
When both fighters are on your feet it's pretty standard stuff.
You've got a right punch and a left punch, a right kick and a left kick.
Distance determines what kind of attack you do.
If you're right up in their face for instance you may elbow them or knee them.
Fighting style also plays a factor in what attacks are available to you, of which there are six.
Three striking styles and three grappling styles.
It seems to me that considering the roster is 80+ strong well I don't know, it might seem that some fighters are shoehorned into these styles that they mightn't actually do?
Or perhaps everyone in UFC does in fact use the same six fighting styles, I'm no expert.
I'm just pointing out this possible inaccuracy.
And when you're not fighting on your feet you're fighting on the ground and theres a stupid amount of things to consider when you're on the ground. You need to know how to get out of a position in which you're at a disadvantage, so this is one game you'll need to pay heed to the tutorial for. If you're like me you'll probably be constantly referring too it.
It's all well and good to be a great striker and knock people out but if they manage to get you onto the ground and they have you on the bottom they're free to wail on you, submit you, you'll be their bitch if you don't know how to get the hell out and it seems like theres a lot of different counters for all sorts of situations. The game is a lot deeper then initially appears, for certain.
As far as game modes go there is the career mode.
You'll create a fighter from scratch and try to take him to the top.
Which involves too many menus.
When you're not in a fight you're presented with a calender.
It'll tell you when your next fight is, show you upcoming cred opportunities like photo ops - cred being a sort of currency and the more you get the more stuff like sponsors and gym equipment get unlocked.
In the weeks leading up to your fight you choose what you care to do.
You can go to the gym to raise one of your three stats - strength, agility and constitution.
Or something along that line anyway. Or you can spar to increase any one of your numerous fighting stats. All that uses stamina though and it's obviously preferable to not go into a fight with low stamina, so rather then do one of those exercises you can choose to rest and recover.
A lot of my favourite games are essentially just spread sheets.
Hollywood Mogul, Wrestling Spirit 1 & 2, Extreme Warfare Revenge.
They're ALL menus. But I can tolerate them because they're quick to navigate.
In UFC's career mode you'll be navigating a lot of menus, but it doesn't feel so quick.
It's clunky and it's tedious and it makes the career mode not very fun.
I'm all for navigating menus and doing stuff in my UFC career outside of fighting, but they've made it a chore to do so.
Theres another mode where you can recreate what I guess are classic UFC match ups.
Chick of reasonable attractiveness will give you a run down of the fight, they'll show some footage from the fight and then they'll leave you to recreate it as best you can - which can be somewhat difficult, but if you're a UFC buff you'll probably appreciate the mode for the footage and the additional footage you can unlock if you manage to pull off whatever unreasonable task they ask of you.
And then theres online multi player.
I've had a few rounds but it lagged too much for me to be especially effective.
My connections unreliable at the best of times so I'm not chalking it up as a game defect right away, though I have heard from others that they too have experienced stupid amounts of lag so I'll just leave it at that.
Fortunately the game features same screen multi player, allowing you to kick the ass of a nearby buddy if you so choose which works fine for me.
The only downer is that you can't use your created character against another persons created character on another profile. There seems to be no cross profile play.
If you're willing to take the time to do so you can recreate your career character as best you can outside career mode on your friends profile in order to play as your guy, but it's not quite the same. This as I recall has been a problem with the Smackdown vs Raw games as well.
But I guess not enough people have kicked up a fuss over it for it to be something to waste time fixing.
In any event UFC 09: Undisputed is a great game.
Hopefully it does well enough to warrant more UFC games in the future, because theres only a couple of minor things that need tweaking for it to be perfect, in my mind at least.
