Fight Night Champion Demo Impressions - RaychelSnr's Blog

Arena Blog Dynasty Scores Sign Up ☰

RaychelSnr's Blog

Fight Night Champion Demo Impressions Stuck

Posted on February 8, 2011 at 08:26 PM.

(3)

I am what you might call the typical audience Fight Night Champion is wanting to capture. I don't watch boxing much if at all, I hardly know any names currently in the sport, but I still find Fight Night somewhat intriguing and fun.

But here's the catch for me and probably the disclaimer: I'm not the simulation boxing fan by any means. I couldn't tell you the first thing about the sport. What I can tell you is that Fight Night Champion is a much more polished fighter compared to its predecessors and it looks absolutely fantastic. If the story mode is good and online launches well, I see no reason why this game can't be one of the year's finest in our genre.

But those are questions which we can't answer right now, so what about the gameplay?

In an ideal world (at least to me) you should be able to pick up and play any sports game almost immediately thanks to a on-the-surface simple control scheme. However, the control scheme should be like an onion -- with deeper and deeper layers allowing better and better control as you progress with the game. In that regards Fight Night Champion's control scheme succeeds at its goal. I could pick up the game and have modest success with it.

I still feel that realism fans will have some issues with the game, but I also feel the game is a step up from Round 4 in many respects on realism. The stamina meter definitely feels right in this edition, and it forces you to think about what you are doing in the ring outside of wildly punching away. Admittedly, the punch counts are still pretty high it seems. The key for Fight Night Champion's gameplay will be its ability to be varied enough from fight to fight to make you want to keep playing. Again, that's something we can't answer off the demo.

The two different fights I had were quite a bit different in pacing and strategy, so that's a good sign -- and I'm somewhat hopeful the game might help newcomers to the sport like myself along in strategizing a bit. In a lot of ways, EA has to both educate fans on how to box while also making it entirely fun. If you have to apply real world strategies based upon pacing and reach and whatnot into each fight, I can honestly see Fight Night Champion being the best playing game thus far in the series from a pure fun factor standpoint.

Overall, I'm somewhat intrigued and impressed by the demo. I don't know if we are looking at a really quality type of game that steals the show like EA Sports MMA somewhat did last year, but I do believe the game won't be bad at all -- and that's a positive step already.

We'll have more coverage of Fight Night Champion as we near its release date March 1!!!

Comments

# 1 SHAKYR @ Feb 9

You just proved my point that I have been trying to make to the Fight Night Producers. You can make a boxing fan out of a casual if the sport is done as closely to real life boxing as possible. NBA 2k has converted many non basketball fans.

# 2 Dazraz @ Feb 9

The demo shows off both the positives & negatives of the forthcoming title. The game looks & plays better than ever but EA have given no attention to the presentation elements. The atmosphere is dull & does nothing to build up the fight. This is coupled with diabolical commentary. Don't kid yourselves either. The full game will be no better in this regard.
EA seem to have accepted that the same people who bought the last version of Fight Night will buy this one. There doesn't seem to be any break through features or major steps forward that will attract anyone new to the product.