UFC Undisputed 2009
Hello Ladies and Gents, Welcome back to another action packed Kevo review. Today I’ll be giving my review of UFC Undisputed 2009 for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. The game is made by THQ, who has a good track record with sports games. The game is licensed by the UFC so it features the likeness of about 100 fighters from the company. The game has online capabilities as well as solo play, all of which factor in to the overall game play. So lets start breaking this shit down.
The games features 4 different game types, Exhibition, Online play, Hall of Fame fights, and Career mode. All of the play types are very standard for any sports game, Exhibition is just for jumping into a fight quickly, Online you can battle against other Online foes, And Hall of Fame is putting you into one of 5-6 fights that were historical for the UFC. I’ll focus mainly on the Career mode because it has the most depth. Career mode starts with creating a new fighter from scratch, the Create-A-fighter system is pretty in large, but at the same time basic and easy to do.
The actual physical appearance of your fighter can be customized, you can have the standard hair styles, skin types, height/weight, Tattoos, but the Facial structure system gives you so much range in creating fighters you will never create the same fighter twice. You can select your fighter skills by assigning points to certain categories. You have the basic; Strength, Speed, Cardio, then, you can go more in depth to choose if you want your fighter to be a submission guy, or a striker. Once you have yourself all created, you can pick you fighter’s name, this is a big negative. The game doesn’t recognize spelling, which is bullshit, cause I’ve seen games do it 100 times, really is the name Kevin Rogers, that hard? Anyways, you can choose from a list of nick names pre recorded, that way when the announcing is going on it will at least say your nickname.
So now that you’ve created your fighter, it’s time to start your career. You’re welcomed to the UFC from the president, Dana white, your welcome gift, a fight. This first fight is mostly to determine where you should be ranked to start your career. Once you win or lose this fight, you are brought to the main screen where you can in turn choose your next opponent. The match-maker always gives you a choice of 3 fights, normally 1 fighter is higher ranked than you, 1 fighter is lower ranked, and the 3rd is someone who’s about your same skill level. Once you select who you are facing next you can go into training. There is 3 different types of training you can do, Work Out, Sparring, Invite a Camp;
Work Out: This is the basic way to work out, you can select if you want to work on your Strength, Cardio, or Speed, and if you want to work Soft, Medium, Hard.
Sparring: This is where your sparring partner mimics your next opponent’s skills, thus preparing you for your next fight.
Invite a Camp: You can invite some UFC superstars to come in and train you some new moves.
So basically you work your way up the ladder fighting and hopefully beating your opponents. As you progress with the game, you can unlock rewards, and upgrades. You can upgrade your gym with better equipment, you can gain sponsors, and you can win awards like “fight of the night” or “KO of the night”. All of this stuff is useless and does not contribute to the progress of your fighter. It is more just a status thing to show how big your… ego, is. Anyways, so you can fight your way up the ranks of the UFC, starting with some no name guys and working up to the Champions and some UFC superstars. After 7 years of fighting your created fighter is force to retire. Gay, I know.
Alright, so let’s get down to business here and I’ll give you a positive negative breakdown of each aspect of the game.
Sound effect/Graphics: This is probably the best part about this game, the sound is great, and the graphics are out of this world. Even the commentary provided by Joe Rogan and Mike Goldberg is solid. Unlike a lot of sports games the commentary doesn’t feel repetitive in the least; it stays fresh, and doesn’t get on your nerves much. Not much in the way of negative here.
Controlling: The Controller responds well to your commands, IF, you know what commands to put in. There is so many button combination involved in this game, it can piss you off at times. When you are Standing up and striking with someone, it can be easy, however once you transition to the ground game, it gets confusing as all hell. If you can take the time to learn the ground game you can probably become unstoppable, because no one, even the computer it seems sometimes, can’t do anything.
You will get frustrated playing this game, let me give you a scenario, I was just playing this morning, I had just rattled off about 8 wins in a row, and winning the heavy weight title belt. My fighter is a monster, I have just about every aspect of his game at the top, yet, I lose the belt in my next fight, as well as go on to lose the next 3 all by submission. All of this happened while I was putting in the button combination that the game had given me to defend against submissions. Needless to say I try to keep the fight standing.
Game play: Ok, this is where the majority of my beef with this game comes from. The Career mode is garbage. You can tell they rushed through the process of making career mode. It’s not in depth AT ALL, very basic, no frills. I’m used to madden career mode where everything is something to do or control. There is no age progression as the years pass, literally, there is none, when I created my fighter, I made him 26, when I retired after 7 years of fighting in my last fight, it showed I was 26. That’s just little stuff that goes along way. The could have improved even further, if they would have added, time damage, if my eyes keeps getting busted up, maybe I have a big scar their, or maybe after 7 years of fighting I have some wrinkles for gods sake.
The other thing that bothered me about the game play again has to do with progression, like in the game Madden, if I start my career as a quarter back, after 5 years, guys start to retire around me, and you know what the system does, it auto generates new guys to fill in those rolls. In Undisputed, there is none of that. It’s the same guys in the game the whole time. Chuck Liddell is 40 years old now, if I make a fighter, in 2 years he should be retired, yet, he keeps fighting, because there is no age progression. It would be cool if after 3 years, Anderson Silva and Dan Henderson retire, and 2 new auto generated fighters take their place within the ranks. That would have made the game more in depth, and 100 times better.
So, after all that, I’m sure you’re asking yourself what type of rating am I going to give this game. Well, even with all the faults this game has, it is still very fun to play. The Create a fighter is an amazing system, even without the name recognition. If you have a group of friends around, I can see how this game would be amazing to set up mini tournaments. The game itself has a lot of great possibilities in its future, it just seems as though it’s not fully developed yet. It’s not a good sign when I’m looking forward to UFC undisputed 2010, when this game just came out. With all of that being said, in honor of national heart attack month, I’m going to give this game 2 ½ boxes of Mac ‘N Cheese, out of 5.
Basically, rent it with your friends, fight it out, but you can pass on buying it this year.
