When a game comes out on any platform, it will inevitably be compared to similar titles on the same platform. That’s natural really. So it’s with no apologies whatsoever that in this review, I’ll be comparing Prizefighter to Fight Night Round 3 at almost every turn, considering they’re the only two boxing games available on the Xbox 360 at the moment. Fight Night Round 3 was very well received when it was released, and it’s still played quite a lot by people today for its excellent online side which can produce some absorbing fights. Prizefighter comes out hoping that Fight Night Round 3 is on its last legs and wants to be the one to deliver the knockout blow.

Now, when I play a boxing game, there are two things I want from it – I want a great career mode, and of course I want the action to be as realistic and enjoyable as possible. I’ll start the review by looking at the career mode of Prizefighter. This is an area where I felt Fight Night missed the boat. They had a very simplistic career mode that offered nothing at each stage except a few different choices of who to fight, with no real connection to the boxing world. You never knew where you were ranked; you never knew who the champion was, or how close you were to a title fight. It felt simply tacked on as a means to give you a reason to fight everyone. In short, it was poor. Prizefighter approaches the career mode from a completely different angle. Rather than starting at the beginning of a career and going from there, Prizefighter presents the career to you as a series of flashbacks told documentary style. Between each series of fights, there will be video clips of various people talking about you and what was going on in the different stages of your career. This is done exceptionally well as not only does it feature good performances from the actors in the clips (including a well known face in Mario Van Peebles), but there are real world boxers who play their part as well. Boxers like Joe Calzaghe, Shannon Briggs, Larry Holmes and Joe Louis all appear throughout the documentary footage and it really brings you into the career, as there is a good storyline in there. It’s nothing special and could easily have come from a Rocky film, but it’s something completely different for a boxing game and I couldn’t help but enjoy it. I wanted to carry on playing because of it, as I wanted to unlock the next set of film clips. I wanted to find out what people were going to say about me next. It’s unique and very enjoyable.

Not only do you have a good storyline to the career mode, but throughout it you’ll face different challenges here and there that you need to overcome. This may be fighting someone one handed due to a late injury, or facing someone who is drugged up and unable to feel pain, or fighting after a night out when you have no energy left. You won’t know what these fights are (short of looking them up on the internet ahead of time), and they’re good challenges as they will force you to fight differently to normal.

The career also contains some very enjoyable training exercises. There are 5 training games each of which affect 2 of your 4 attributes (when will games developers realise that a boxer is made up of more than 4-5 attributes?!). They are generally fun games but 2 stand out for me – the speed bag and the skipping. They’re both rhythm games, played in a similar way to games like Boom Boom Rocket, where you have to press 1 or 2 face buttons at a certain time. As you hit more and more “notes” it starts to become very fast and it can be quite challenging in the end. Getting high scores in those 2 exercises certainly feels like an achievement.

However, that’s not to say that the career is without its problems. As you go through the career you have no idea of the relative abilities of any of the possible opponents you are given. You have to assume that the more you are paid for each fight, the better your opponent is, but I would have liked the ability to check out their stats before I fought them. Are they powerful but without stamina? Are they quick and tough but have no punch strength? Knowing such things can help you tailor your own training to suit your opponent, and also your fight strategy will be different. You’re not going to go toe to toe with someone who has enough power to take your head off are you? There’s also the same problem that there was in Fight Night 3, where there is no visible ranking list available so you have no idea where you sit in the overall scheme of things. Perhaps in the career mode here which is told in a more story like fashion it’s not as necessary as in Fight Night, but it’s still something I would like to have seen. One final thing I thought was strange was that during your career, you’ll get messages on your PDA between fights giving you a chance to partake in an activity of some kind. These activities fall into two categories – training programs which increase your stats but decrease your media profile, or media events which bump up your profile, but will reduce your stats. I wouldn’t normally see choices like this as a bad thing, except I couldn’t find any real use for bumping up your media profile whatsoever. Sure, the higher your profile is the more money you’ll get for each fight, but seeing as I didn’t spend any money during my career at all (and I’m not even sure you can, unless the option was well hidden from me), it seems pointless. If there were some tangible benefit to having more money, such as the ability to buy items to boost your stats, then I’d be all for it. As it stands, it seems a pointless addition which only seems designed to give the illusion of having more choices throughout your career. I would say tough that the problems pointed out above are pretty minor in the grand scheme of things, and don’t detract from your enjoyment of the career mode at all. What does bring the fun factor down is the actual fighting itself.

The control scheme in Fight Night was innovative, and really gave you more of a connection with the boxer you were controlling. Using the right thumbstick to throw punches was intuitive after only a few fights, and gave you real control over what kind of punches you were throwing, as well as the power behind them. I was hoping that other developers would follow suit, as pretty much everyone who played Fight Night agreed that it was a far better control method to using face buttons for punches. Alas, the developers at Venom Games decided to use the face button method, and the game suffers for it. With each face button assigned to a different punch, and with 6 different punches available, you have to press button combinations (A+X, and B+Y with the standard configuration) to use uppercuts. This can be a problem if you don’t hit the buttons together exactly right, as you can often throw a different punch to the one you were hoping for. Also, the game queues up button presses, so you can often find yourself throwing punches you didn’t mean simply because the game hasn’t kept up with you. After Fight Night, the control scheme seems almost archaic by comparison. Not only that but the collision detection in the ring is very suspect. I’ve seen punches go through shoulders and apparently miss; punches that look like they did miss somehow hit the fighter in the back of the head, and some very general bad detection. Given how Fight Night got this area pretty much spot on, I was hoping that Prizefighter would also nail it down. I mean, in any fighting game you really want to know you’re connecting with your opponent and causing them some pain. In Prizefighter that simply isn’t the case at times

Then there’s the animation. The fighters all feel a bit too slow at times, with no jabs popping out with hand blurring speed, no quick dodges and ducks to get away from punches. When you do make your boxer dash in any direction by double tapping the left stick, it doesn’t look quite natural. If you land a huge uppercut, you should be able to tell by the reaction of your opponent, with his head snapping back and perhaps a stumble. Again, it doesn’t always happen. I’ve been knocked backwards several times by a simple jab, but probably not as often from any of the huge shots I’ve taken. All these are little things by themselves, but they add up to a problem that spoils your immersion in the game and hampers your enjoyment of it.

Another thing I have to mention that also detracts from the game is the commentary. It’s provided by Jim Lampley and Emanuel Steward and it’s mediocre at best. They never come out with any telling lines about the fight, they often seem to be having different conversations as what one says often has no relevance to what the other did. And they seem to have no idea how to judge a fight whatsoever. I’ve had rounds where I’ve knocked the other guy down twice, suffered very little damage myself, yet between rounds they’ve commented on how my opponent must have won the round. I’m just thankful they’re only commentators and not the judges!

I must add a special mention here for the music though. While most of the songs are the usual type you’d expect in a game like this (hip-hop and rock), they do have possibly the most apt tune for a boxing game ever – Eye of the Tiger, by Survivor. It was the theme tune for Rocky 3 and is perhaps the song more than any other that’s associated with boxing. It really is a quality song choice for the game so definitely deserves this special mention.

You may think that after the going over I gave the fighting mechanics that I didn’t like the game very much, but you’d be wrong. Despite the problems, fights were still enjoyable and the career mode was good enough to make you want to carry on, to find out where the journey takes you next. Sure, the fighting engine could have been tightened up and the animations could have been better, but it didn’t stop the game from being enjoyable. If you’re after the best boxing game on the 360, then definitely steer yourself towards Fight Night Round 3, but if you’re after an enjoyable boxing experience with a great career mode, then Don King’s Prizefighter could well be the game for you.

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