So many mistakes.
As an avid fan of MMA and the UFC I was really looking forward to this title. I am very disappointed though as the game plays like a brawler and does not mimic the sport in any way other than through a familiar vocabulary of terms. The biggest neglect in this title is that it ignores the very things that make the great athletes out there great.
Anderson Sylva is one of the most fluidly evasive fighters in the world and has incredible accuracy with his strikes, but this game has no evasion system. Fighters move like they are in a mud pit which makes Sylva's signature evasive maneuvering obsolete. Also, every fighter strikes with the same accuracy.
The submission and ground fighting gameplay is horrible. Instead of a fighters submission skill actually being the biggest factor, it is in fact your opponents fatigue level. Submission is not about strength and cardio but about skill and technique. There should have been a bigger focus on countering attempted submissions than the ridiculous button mashing and stick spinning mess. (I stripped the rubber clean off my controller when attempting a 'technical escape' from a submission) The submission skill of someone like Thales Leites is not represented in the least. There have been countless real world fights that have ended in the first minute due to a tactical error and subsequent submission. This game either wants you to brawl with someone until their fatigue is down or wait for them to attack you relentlessly to get their bar into the yellow.
The striking game is best described as wild brawling. There is no calculated movement. There is a good reason people hesitate to strike wildly in the real world of MMA. This leaves you open and will result with you on the floor. This game gives such a minimal risk to jumping in swinging that it has become the most popular technique in online fights and has proven to be the most effective in my experience when going through the career mode. This game gives great results when you repeatedly head kick or superman punch a bunch. The heavy hands of Chuck Liddell are not so heavy here as an opponent can take ten lunging strikes to the melon before getting rocked. Sure, they can get one punch KOed but this either requires them to be fatigued or have them stepping into a punch. While both of these scenarios are realistic, the experience of seeing either the AI or a human opponent take a barrage of hits without falling is comical.
The AI is poor as well. I can be in a title defense match with Sylva as an opponent and literally body kick him the hole match until he gets rocked. Then a simple right hook to the head and its game over. The speed that is seen when an opponent falls down is also gone from the game. Once someone is rocked the attacker will dive in with everything they have in the real world. Here, after rocking someone who falls, its once again a walk through the mud to get over them and start hitting, often giving enough time to recover. The diving punch to a grounded opponent also does rediculously low damange and in my experience will never rock or KO an opponent even though it is in the real world one of the strongest, but most risky, attacks.
The online play is broken. Rage quiting is not penalized and does not reward a win. You can KO your opponent and the person on the other end has plenty of time to casually press eject button on their tray while the highlights play. People have found a way to exploit the create a fighter system to get max stats which makes playing with CAF pointless.
Finally, this game is the perfect example of how to not create menus. The most common tasks in the game require multiple menu scrolls and selections each with a poor load time. Why do I need to dive through five menus to continue my career? Why is there a whole screen dedicated to asking if I want to retire my fighter every time I load up? After every career fight you are likely to gain another sponsor. How do you use this? You go through more than a dozen menu selections to simply apply a new logo to your shorts. Then after you get to the gear menu and change something, you need to manually back out through every menu you just went through, then save, then exit. It got so bad I just stopped adding or upgrading sponsors. The saving is horrendously long as well; and this game loves to save. It saves after sparring, fighting, and changing anything on your equipment. It even shows you what it is saving. Every time it saves you get to see it saving your career, then verifying your career, then saving your character, then verifying that save all while watching an octagon shaped clock spin. There is no option to turn off auto saves either. The main menu itself is terrible. Because there are movies playing above each menu item, simply scrolling through results in an annoying pause between each. The menu presentation in this game is abysmal.
Two stars is a bit harsh I know but the combination of a lack of realism with spending more time in menus than in the ring made this game a really poor experience over all.
