As someone who doesn’t give a rats ass about UFC, and I never watch anything to do with it, I always seem to play the games. It does help when it was one of the free PS Plus subscription games of the month though. It also makes for a great quick take review for this game as it doesn’t really warrant a full blown one.
The game itself looks pretty decent, and handles well, especially in the main area of combat, with the different actions, and the fighting itself being fluid. Swapping stances and striking from a boxing strike, to a rear naked choke submission is easy as anything, just merely flip the right stick in the direction you want it to do and then partake in the mini game to fully submit your opponent.
The online play is a bit weak, it definitely suffers from if you aren’t good or new you will lose, much like any online shooter. It just takes practice but I doubt you’ll want to sink that many hours into it to be honest. Also by doing certain actions online or offline will gain you rewards and level rank. Which unlocks stuff for your player card which isn’t that much of an incentive either, as it doesn’t affect the game a whole lot.
The career mode is fine, but ultimately lacks any real substance to it. Once you’ve become the G.O.A.T, outside of creating a new character and doing it again it’s dull. The fighting is fun, and learning certain fighters moves, in a sparring match is a nice touch adding more moves to your repertoire never hurts. But you select how many weeks you want to train before the fight, and you have promotional, learn about the opponent, social interactions and sparring for fitness to do and that’s it. You have a 100 points to divide out over all these actions a week, and it doesn’t go far. Every fight you will start with no fitness. Over the sparring you will level up used moves and gain experience to put in them from the fighter menu. You will definitely notice the difference as you go from no rank to a 5 star fighter. So in that aspect the game has done very well. The social interaction could be fun, if it wasn’t worthless, occasionally if you’re lucky you will get a tweet from another fighter, and you can pick to either improve or reduce relations with them which only affect learning a move, and price reduction for it. Outside of promotional bonuses and side objectives on contract bonuses there is nothing else to do other then maybe customise your characters design slightly.
The game isn’t bad, and is really only worth picking up as and when you feel the urge to. As every part of the game is just missing that extra bit of content. There is a depth of a roster to pick from in men’s and women’s divisions, with all the weight classes. Career mode is thin, and online isn’t that fun so you are better off just playing offline against the standard arcade CPU.
I’d certify this 5/10 barely tasty as it’s not inherently bad, and it looks good graphically even with the occasional weird rag doll physic, but it’s just bare bone across the board, and doesn’t invite replaying all that much.
14th August 2020
TastyRetroGaming 