Fight Night 360 - Early Impressions
The adrenaline tank I’ve been running on for nearly two weeks with all the craziness at work finally ran out last night. I’m talking absolutely dead on my feet. I don’t really even remember driving home at the end of the day. Naturally, Ana picked this night to act out every bit of her two years: stomping, throwing, hitting, the whole nine. Finally, I turned to Angie and said if our daughter was going to be like that the whole evening that I needed her to handle it. Passing the buck with my kids is something I’ve never done in the two years I’ve been a parent, but at that point all I wanted to do was smack her, and obviously, that wasn’t an option.
It was however, a good mood to be in to test out Fight Night. Beating the snot out of some lame amateur boxers was a nice tonic with which to finish off the day. FYI - for those on a budget, Fry’s is selling it for 47.99 instead of 59.99. Since I had a Best Buy Reward Zone coupon I went with BB and had them price match the Fry’s deal, so it was nice to save a little coin there.
So far the game’s chief selling point is the graphics (on the 360, anyway). Not much has changed from the demo, but they are still stunning. This is the game to show people who haven’t seen a 360 in action. I continue to be impressed with the range of emotion in each boxer’s features. The actual gameplay, however, feels more refined than revolutionized. It’s too early to see how well the game’s been balanced compared to Round 2, but it does feel smoother in terms of combining bobs, blocks, counters, etc. The sound, to my ear, is also improved. You can tell how hard a guy is trying to hit (or how tired he is) from the sounds he makes while punching. You can hear a fighter breathing heavy if he’s getting gassed. Etc. All-in-all, if you liked previous versions, I think you’ll like this one.
That said I remain under whelmed in terms of improvements to the career mode. You can do more with creating a fighter in terms of his look (though I still can’t make a truly pale white guy to match my defining characteristic). It’s not to the Tiger Woods PC level, but it’s better than in most sports games. It was also cool, in an embarrassing way, that I could create an amateur consistent with my build (scrawny and under 130 pounds). However, once you get into career mode there’s not much new.
You can spar during training, but it’s more for your own practice and has no effect on your boxer. The other training modes are all the same (dummy, heavy bag and weights) and they affect the same set of attributes (power, speed, cuts, heart, etc.). Although, when you pick a training method it now has a slight negative impact on the attributes that method doesn’t improve. So if I hit the heavy bag I’ll get a hefty bonus to my endurance, but my speed will drop slightly. I don’t remember the game doing this last year and I like the idea since it prevents you from completely ignoring certain any of the training methods.
Rankings, however, appear to be completely gone. Now your boxer is graded on his popularity, which seems to increase via your overall record or by taking on higher-profile fights. I like the notion of a popularity rating, but aren’t rankings a significant part of the sport too? How is it that the feature can just be dropped?
I’m also still not a fan of the degree to which your equipment (your shorts in particular) affect your attributes. Seriously, the pro shop section of the game doesn’t have a toe hold on reality (which is nothing new). I mean who spends middle six figures on trunks and whose trunks make them a better boxer? It’s a minor thing, but it remains silly. And from a game design perspective, I think it’s a lazy way of trying to “add” to the gameplay. What’s more frustrating to me is that you still have to scroll through the various pieces one-by-one for each category with no way to sort based on price, manufacturer, available items, etc. It takes forever to scroll through the various trunks and you can’t see anything beyond the description (which tells you diddly) without pressing the preview button. It was monotonous in FN Round 2 and it appears exactly the same this time around too.
I also don’t get why you still can’t put your own damn music in the game. (At least not from what I can see so far.) Given the rather limited selection of tracks you can choose from (in terms of genre), it would be nice if my lanky trailer-trash cracker of a boxer could cruise into the ring listening to Van Halen or something. I get that a lot of people like rap music and that’s fine, but it ain’t exactly my cup ‘o afternoon tea and I’d like to have my boxer enter the ring to the tune of something that I find at least remotely palatable.
At this point I’ve gone through four amateur bouts (all KO’s). From what I’ve read Round 3 follows the familiar pattern of being quite easy in the early going and then stiffening up as you establish your record as a pro. (Too me that’s very much appropriate and a decent reflection of the actual sport.) My next match is for the amateur title that, if consistent with last year’s formula, will open up the pro opponents. I’d have liked to get through all the amateur stuff last night, but frankly my opponents weren’t the only ones ready to hit the canvas by the time I set the controller aside. Hopefully tonight I’ll have a little more energy and will actually be able to enjoy playing the game on it’s merits rather than imagining the heads of certain other people on my opponent’s body as I land a haymaker.
Quibbles aside, Fight Night Round 3 is still monumentally entertaining and worth every penny (if you can get it cheaper than the ridiculer 59.99 conventional pricing).