Game review: Fight Night Round 4 

Source: GamefreakGamefreak review: Fight Night Round 4

Fight Night Round 4

Platform: Xbox 360, PS3

Publisher: Electronic Arts

Do you fancy yourself as an undiscovered boxing prodigy?

Well, here's your chance to live it out on screen with Fight Night Round 4. A blood, sweat and tears approach to one of the world's oldest sports.

By no means do I consider myself a sports game fan. However, I have always had a soft spot for EA's Fight Night. In case the name doesn't mean anything to you, we're talking about boxing. There's something satisfying, even primal about going head-to-head with another guy in the ring and, hopefully, laying him flat on the ground a few times. Maybe part of this pleasure come form knowing it's something I'd never do in real life, which really is kind of the point of videogames in the first place!!

Fight Night Round 4 is something of a rebound from EA's last cartoonish boxing sim Facebreaker which was, to be rather blunt, just awful. Fight Night 4 takes the opposite angle in being realistic, approachable and damn fun to play.

The core of the game is the Legacy mode in which you can use a famous boxer with his stats zapped down, or more probably your own created player. I opted for the latter and with the Xbox Live Vision camera got myself on on-screen digital self which somehow looked nothing like me. Oh well.

The aim of Legacy is to fight your player to super stardom and then retire gracefully before old age catches up with you and your legendary status diminishes as newer and fitter boxers pummel your ageing bones into the ground. This process involves booking fights (you can expect maybe 50 or 60 in your career), preferably against people with higher ranks although occasional grudge matches will result in personal challenges. On top of this you also have to train regularly in order to buff up your stats. This is done either via training games or by letting the CPU automatically get you the results.

Unfortunately, this training aspect ruined the Legacy mode for me. You need your stats to be high to reach super-stardom. The training games themselves are by-and-large boring and in some cases very hard. If you get a low score your stats increase at a trickle and leaving the CPU to take care of it for you doesn't do a much better job either so, it's quite possible to be seriously outmatched in your climb to the top but that's fine.

You can box to your heart's delight in the Fight Mode in which you can control and pair yourself up against any of EA's large roster of famous boxers. If you so wish you can even let the CPU control both fighters and play out a dream boxing match. Mohammed Ali beat Mike Tyson by a scorecard victory after ten rounds by the way.

Obviously, this stretches out to include multi-player modes too. Fight Night Round 4 is a great game to play with friends and can be played naturally on the same console. You can also play it online and attempt to prove your worth around the world. This is, in part, spoilt by a large number of online players using a cheap body punching tactic which is pretty much unbeatable if you're trying to box properly. Hopefully, EA will find a way to fix this in an update in the near future.

Synopsis:  it's not perfect but Fight Night Round 4 is a very good game. The difficulty has been notched up a bit from previous games and seeing as earlier versions tended to be a bit too easy anyway, that's not necessarily a bad thing.

This review brought to you by Gamefreaks.