Showdown at the KO Corral
Nothing beats watching that slo-mo right hook to the face over and over as your current nemesis drops to the canvas.Fight Night Round 4 was a pleasant surprise with intuitive control mechanics and deep, white-knuckled strategy.
This is one game in which stats really do matter, as you can often tell just by first glance, what sort of tactics you're going to want to use. You can quickly find out if your opponent has trained for power or stamina, has long or short reach, or a weak chin, and work to exploit their weaknesses. The granularity of each fighter combined with fantastically simulated boxers, makes FNR4 the sort of game that is almost infinitely re-playable.
There are some problems though. The Legacy mode's UI is a real downer, clunky menus are pervasive, emails run rampant and offer little useful information. The fighting is so excellent however, that this flaw is pretty easy to over look once the fists start to fly.
I typically hate sport Sim games, but this game gets the "fun" of the sport right, where games like Madden complicate things to unreasonable amounts. This could be just that the sport, in practice, is pretty simple - put the other guy on the mat. Fight Night Round 4 does the right thing in that regard by providing simple tools for complex problems.
