UFC
Producer: EA Canada
Release Date: June 17, 2014
Platform: Xbox One, PS4
Rating: Teen
Genre: Fighting
Choked Out!
Written by Jesse Seilhan
The mixed-martial arts rise to fame has been meteoric. From a second-hand circus bloodsport to a professional, regulated, multi-million dollar global enterprise, fans of the sport have seen the good and the bad over the past few decades. The Ultimate Fighting Championship is the king of the crop, and have had a few videogames made in their name in order to bring the experience to the home, but after THQ went out of business, they were without a publisher and a developer. Enter Electronic Arts, a company that at one point told the head of UFC, Dana White, that they “wanted nothing to do” with the promotion. But times change, money was exchanged, and EA brought on the old Fight Night team to rework their Ignite engine into a brand new UFC game, dubbed EA Sports UFC. But is it a title contender or is it punching above its weight?
First off, you can’t look at this game without being impressed. Visually, it might be the best graphical representation of the human body gaming has ever seen. From the muscles that twitch with each strike to the sweat dripping off of each combatant, no game has ever captured the raw emotion and visceral art that is cage fighting. The animation is nearly as good, as each fighter moves smoothly, for the most part, and has realistic reactions to each punch, kick, and choke. Sometimes the engine gets a little buggy and limbs bend in crazy angles, but that is rare and often pretty hilarious. Also, the game boasts nearly 100 fighters on the roster and the majority of the marquee names look nearly identical to their real-life counterparts, including, for the first time, female fighters like Ronda Rousey.
What separates any good fighting game from the trash is how it handles, and that is where UFC has some issues. The striking is fun, fast, and furious, with flash knockouts and brutal shots coming off as painful in the digital space as they are in real life. But when it comes to the ground game, both submissions and transitions, there is a lot of work to do. Triggers need to be held down and the right stick has to be turned in quarter-circle motions to initiate both takedowns and submissions. Once a hold is locked in, a four-way radial screen pops up and the player doing the choking has to tap the stick in any of the four directions. The person being choked has to outsmart the attacker by tapping the stick in a different direction. It’s not intuitive, it doesn’t represent the skill of submission work, and it often leads to stand-ups and missed chances, without much feedback as to how or why it happened. To be fair, not a single MMA game has ever gotten the submission mechanic down, often going between some sort of button-mashing frenzy or nuanced stick work.
The career mode is where most gamers will spend their time, but what they find there might not keep them around for long. You can create a fighter, improve particular aspects of your game via the training minigames, have a couple fights, then rinse and repeat until you’re done. That’s it, and the only thing separating these moments are video messages from Dana White, random trainers, and other UFC personalities encouraging you to “keep it up,” even if you’re one fight away from beating them for the belt. Experience points can be earned during training and fights, which is then used to improve particular aspects of your fighter, such as your striking or stamina.
What should have been a technical marvel ends up being a bit shallow. While attention was certainly paid to how the game looks and feels, the mechanics and art of some of the fighting wasn’t given as much love. The campaign mode leaves a ton to be desired, but if you just want to sit on a couch with your buddy and beat each other up, it’s great. Just don’t go looking for more than that.