Fight Night Round 3

Let's play the “Play EA” game! The only game in the world where you pretend to be a multi million dollar gaming corporation and try to make more money with the least effort possible. So, in today's game, your challenge is the next gen wars- how you need to prepare for the new advent of the XBOX 360 and upcoming releases of the Nintendo Revolution and Sony PS3. As the game goes today, you just showed one hell of an impressive video at E3, detailing how the PS3 could uniquely have the face ripple on a boxer when he got hit by a glove in a demonstration of the future game Fight Night Round 3- and everyone just peed their pants in excitement. And it looks like Q2 2006 is going to be a bad season for your games. What do you do?

If you said, “Quickly make the rest of Fight Night Round 3 and release early”, you win the game. For some reason, it seems like EA, instead of taking the smart route and actually releasing this game on the intended systems at the right time, decided to cut corners and release it early. And it's proved to be one of their worst decisions, ever. The second I turned on this game on my XBOX, I knew something was up, and it only took me about 10 minutes to discover what. So, as I review this, keep in mind- this isn't some kind of accident or mishap- this is called trying to make money on the cheap.

The Fight Night series is a boxing series that sticks remarkably to the style and look of Boxing, setting itself apart from other games that make the sport of Boxing more like an arcade-ish toy. While the original Fight Night games were by no means stunning or amazing, they were realistic, which won over many traditional boxing fans in terms of gameplay and graphics. Of course, leave it up to most over hyping game reviewers to make the series seem legendary, but just accept that the games were good, but not amazing. Then we get Round 3, on the XBOX, PS2, and XBOX 360.

And god, it suffers. The game features a control stick centered punching system, which boils down to using the shoulder buttons (To lean and power up) and then the control stick to tap the punch into place. Yes, there's a reason I used the word “Tap”- the game loses about every single kind of weight because of this “Revolutionary” system it uses. Because it essentially forces you to use some variation of this system, every single punch and move feels weightless and empty, and overall makes every single bout you participate in feel like it's Gramma's boxing game. Even with powerful hits that “Shake” the screen, I wasn't sold on the hits to the character, as every single shot seemed to hit the air, and kinda just fell flat. Even seeing the better players in this game, or watching a “Hard” CPU, I wasn't sold on the fighting aspect. Some more proficient players could probably get this game to “Feel” like it, but as I come from a primarily 2D/3D fighting game background, it's hard for me to transition to something so different and odd. It can be best compared to a really complex strategy game- people who get it will get it, but the rest of us will just get irritated.


There are some cool features to Fight Night Round 3, don't get me wrong. One thing that'll make boxing fans go crazy is the ability to play the “ESPN Classic” mode, which takes you back through classic bouts in Boxing history. That's pretty damn cool, because everyone likes beating the hell out of Muhammad Ali. The bouts take forever (Because of the unwieldy system I mentioned above, it tends to feel like your opponent will get up fifty million times before he keels over) and by no means are they as intense or fun as the original bouts, but they still have a touch of nostalgia to them.

Of course, the real factor in this game is the Career mode, which is just like every other sports game at this point in Video Gaming- Fight Night Round 3 just takes you to make a character, sign contracts, and beat the stuffing out of anyone in the ring. This was actually fun, because it adds a depth to the game that it really needs to feel complete, and the career mode is just deep enough to keep hardcore players interested for a big chunk of time. It's nothing original, but by no means is it not fleshed out, which is one thing EA actually excels at- making sure Sports games have enough to them to actually be more than the game itself.

One thing I disagree with on about every other group's review on this game has to do with the sound and graphics- from seeing what this game was BEFORE they decided to cut back on it, Fight Night Round 3 for the XBOX is somewhat of a disappointment in every sense of the word. The backgrounds and general stages are god awful, the developers not even taking the time to make anything but 2D characters doing the same kind of animation over and over. They did spend an acceptable amount of time making the characters look human- but then again, from what we saw at E3 2005, it's like comparing a Honda Accord to a Porsche- the graphics just pale in comparison. Certain angles and shots were obviously made to show off graphics (such as gratuitous shots when a final knockout punch lands on the face), but due to the current gen inherent limitations, it just ends up showing a close up of the muddy textures and cut down model. Oh, and I won't even go into how half the buildings have the Burger King logo on them somewhere. Don't ask me why.

The sound is stereotypical EA stuff, which means you either love it or hate it. To break it down, EA came up with this concept called “EA TRAX”, which is basically a way for them to plug artists mid game. The soundtrack consists of mostly Hip-Hop and Rap-like stuff, changing songs frequently (Though I couldn't tell, it all sounds the same) and always displaying what it feels to be important information about the song name. They've done this in about every sports game and racing game they've made in the last two to three years, and if you like it, you like it, but some of us really don't give a care who made the kind of boring music they blast at you in the menu.

The inevitable conclusion of this review is that Fight Night Round 3, for all intents and purposes, is simply for boxing fans. Fans of fighting games don't want to spend three hours poking at Muhammad Ali to only have him get up again with that dumb grin on his face. Nor do most gamers want to hurt their thumbs like I did trying to play with a thumbstick when the whole game would have been much better with the tried-and-true button layout. Fans of the series brag about how the game is the only boxing game in the industry because it is so good- actually, I present to you that there is no other game like this purely because these games prove you really can't make boxing that fun. I'll stick with Super Punch-Out on the Super NES, which is consistently funner than this game in about every way (Even graphically, which is funny, considering the SNES game has buck toothed Mike Tyson as one big brown blob looking thing).

3.5 star(s) out of 5

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