Ain't Gonna Be No Rematch
I think we can all agree that the modern mixed martial artist is in a class of athlete unto itself. Able to deftly weave between the power and grace of a boxer, with the agility of a gymnast and the mental acumen of a tournament chess player, a mixed martial artist must not only be physically imposing, but must also know exactly how to respond to any of the thousands of life-threatening (the UFC has never seen a fatality, but is always theoretically possible when 205lb men punch one another in the face)situations that face them in the course of a fight. Of course this describes the highest levels of competition in mixed martial arts, a fight between individuals with little to no training in the sport (or those that lack talent) will engage in fights that look like ugly brawls or glorified cockfights. Much like the sport on which it is based, UFC Undisputed 2010 creates a barrier for entry that will deter many people from investing heavily in learning it's rich striking and grappling system, with early matches often resembling the ugly brawls of unskilled mixed martial artists. If however, you decide to invest the time necessary to learn the game's deep (Mariana Trench-esque) combat system, you will be rewarded with one of the best fighting games developed in recent years.
Combat in UFC Undisputed 2010 is complicated. I do not mean to suggest that it is prohibitively complicated, or so complicated as to make the game boring, but it is just as complicated as the sport it is trying to represent. Much like actual mixed martial arts, striking and grappling are in play at every moment during a match, and as such the game must represent that reality through its control scheme. At first blush, the controls are overwhelming, and this bewilderment is represented in the quality of the first fights you will have – most likely stand up boxing matches that make the game seem like a low quality Fight Night. However, if you are able to put in the time to progress and learn the intricacies of the controls, the game's combat really begins to sing. The beauty of the controls lies in the interconnectivity of their functionality, allowing a player to strike, grapple and initiate submission moves, with nearly instantaneous transitions. The controls create a layer of combat-depth seen only in fighting games (it would be a mistake to dismiss this as being "merely a sports game").
Online is perhaps where UFC Undisputed 2010 is the most innovative, as it introduces online fight camps to the series. Online fight camps allow groups of fighters to organize, train together and fight members of other camps for positioning on online leader boards. From my experience, fight camps offer a low stress way to organize with friends to teach one another the intricacies of the game and improve each other's performance. Online components in fighting games typically are only concerned with competition and provide little incentive for players to work together – online fight camps allow for the same level of competition that can be found in other fighting games online, while providing a venue for players to meet and train together. While the combat in Undisputed 2010 is fantastic, when we look back on this game in the future it will be to talk about the impact online fight camps had on the fighting genre.
UFC Undisputed 2010 offers a much more robust career mode than its 2009 counterpart, more than doubling its length while providing for a greater level of fighter customization. The career mode does just enough to stay interesting as it lets you develop a fighter from a neophyte striker into a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu mastermind (or however else you would like your fighter to develop). While certainly strong on its own, the career mode really shines as a kind of grand tutorial for both learning the controls and online competition. Your created fighter comes with a set of basic moves that can be upgraded at any time by attending training camps between fights. It is from these camps that you can choose any move you desire for your fighter, which you then acquire by completing an exercise using that move for the training camp. The brilliance of this system is that despite the shear breadth of moves available at any one time to learn, you must slowly acquire those moves one after another – allowing you to learn and add the execution of those moves to your mental repertoire for use in later fights. By making you earn the right to use a move, the game is not only teaching your character the move, but is also teaching you how to do the move as well.
While modern sports games have been seemingly dumbed-down in recent years to capture the widest market potential, Yukes has taken the opposite approach with UFC Undisputed 2010. Yukes and THQ could have taken the easy route, made a game of Facebreaker quality, slapped the UFC logo on it and collected their money. What we have instead is probably the truest representation of mixed martial arts imaginable - both from a fighting perspective as well as having a learning curve that matches on some level the progression an actual mixed martial artist would have in their career. On a final note I don't mean to scare away people by continuingly harping on the complexity of the game, if you put the time in, you will be rewarded (and really, if sitting on a couch while trying to apply a virtual kimura is something that we can consider "difficult" then we live pretty charmed existences). The game is complicated, unforgiving, as well as occasionally infuriating, and I'd have it no other way.
