Fight Night Round 3

Comeback kid

At times you'll fail, sometimes because you simply came up against the wrong fighter at the wrong time; someone much more powerful than you. But eventually you'll get to fight your victors again, and it's amazing what a bit of difference a few years and some concerted training can do.

Much of the credit for the game's hidden depth is down to being blessed with a simple, yet deceptively refined control set. Sure, right from the off you'll be able to pull off jabs and hooks to the head and body, lean through 360 degrees of motion to avoid punches, block up or down, as well as throw energy-sapping impact punches whenever your opponent flails and misses or lets his guard down, but using it effectively is another matter entirely. You could legitimately argue that the control system is simplistic compared to your average beat-'em-up; sure, it lacks hand-wrecking, multi-button combos, but what's there is essentially well realised and works incredibly well within the context of what you need to do, which is what's important.

A word to the wise, though. The default Total Punch control system that utilises the right stick for punches still feels far too unreliable for our liking. Far better to plump for config 5 and actually know that when you press one of the face buttons it does what you want it to, rather than faffing with quarter and half turns on the stick.

The real charm of Fight Night Round 3 is how well it works despite the lack of status bar information (though you can turn on the HUD if you miss it that much); in a real sense, not knowing exactly how close you or your opponent are to the edge enhances the tension. The times when you think you've nailed your opponent, only for them to strike back with a vicious combo makes the whole affair much less predictable, and is something that would have been ruined by the abstract presence of a life bar that - in itself - drains confidence when you're the one taking the beating. By removing such screen furniture, not only is the spectacle more immersive, but forces you to pay attention to the actions of your fighter: their breathing, how fast and accurate their punches are, how long it takes to recover from a battering, and so on.

Finish him!

By the same token, the same thing applies when you're trying to finish an opponent off, with the knowledge that you may be using the last dregs of stamina up in doing so, leaving yourself open to a strong counter attack. At the really advanced stages, so much of the gameplay in Fight Night Round 3 becomes wrapped up in strategies: whether to go in strong, or to hold off and wait for your opponent to wear himself out, and generally focusing in on their various weaknesses (speed over power, for example).

If you wanted to be really picky about Fight Night Round 3, then yes, there are things that don't quite come off. The commentary, for one thing, is utterly repetitive and the hip-hop-by-numbers soundtrack gets a little tiresome, detracting from the otherwise astonishing sound effects. You could also argue that the career mode lacks cohesion, with too many inconsequential battles fought simply to gain the popularity required to get through to the next tier, but that's not so much of an issue once you go pro.

In visual terms Fight Night Round 3's not perfect, either. The bobbing and weaving animation, for example, makes everyone look like they're rotating on a well-oiled central pivot - the sudden, unnatural transitions that both you and the computer AI make are far from realistic, and take the gloss over an otherwise pretty flawless looking game. Such a system might make the game more playable, but surely the tiredness and general speed of an opponent should create an inertia that grows during a fight? Not only would it make the game look more convincing, but the growing sluggishness would make more sense in terms of the playability too. After all, a dead-on-his-feet slugger shouldn't be swing his hips with the lithe precision of a greased up Ronaldinho. And as for the occasional clipping and twitching ragdoll glitches... didn’t we get rid of that in the last generation?

Aside from that, it’s a top notch spectacle, and with all the main weight divisions to conquer, it's hardly a game you can simply conquer and walk away from feeling like you've seen it all. Factor in the other bonus modes, like one-off (ESPN-sponsored) grudge matches between the legends of the past and the joys of multiplayer and it's likely to be a title you'll be coming back to long after you've 'finished' it.

Knockout king

In fact, the online implementation of Fight Night Round 3 is certainly good enough to warrant repeat visits. Admittedly you still have to go through the whole Ts&Cs nonsense (couldn't we just have done that on initial boot up, EA?), and there's not actually much to it, but there doesn't need to be. Getting any kind of ranked or unranked match-up going is as slick and easy as any Live title out there, with leaderboards, stat tracking and huge scope for match customisation - too numerous to boringly list in a review. The only real glaring failure here is the inability to use your custom boxer in multiplayer, but otherwise there's not really much more we could ask for - apart from the inevitable 'give us more real-life boxers' request (a few notable omissions this time, such as Foreman and Liston), and for EA to tone down the blummun' excessive in-game advertising.