Review: Fight Night: Round 3 (360)

What the Fight Night series had over other boxing titles is that you could take a boxer from one era and put him up against another. Fancy seeing who would win between Ali and Evander Holyfield? Or maybe Sugar Ray Robinson against Sugar Ray Leonard? It's like a boxing fan's dream, and why stop there? Try to relive the glory days of yesteryear and take Muhammad Ali to championship gold with the excellent career mode. Here, you simply play in a succession of fights, building up experience before you fight the top dog of each category. Matches are split up with short training sections aimed at improving the stats of your chosen boxer (these can either be skipped or played, depending on how quickly you want to take on your next opponent).

It's during the career mode that Gamestyle noticed EA's heavy reliance on advertisements. Now, driving down the streets in Burnout and noticing signs for McDonalds is fine; it's hardly in your face and you're going at such high speeds that you would hardly notice it. In Fight Night, though, the adverts practically knock you out, kick you while you're down and then steal your wallet. At one point in the career, you fight in the Burger King Invitational, which afterwards earns you the Burger King Achievement. Not stopping there, when choosing a trainer, you can even pick that freaky looking Burger King bloke. It's madness, and let's not forget the other achievements earned from Dodge and Under Armour. We'd be angrier if the gameplay wasn't so much fun.

The clever control system helps make Fight Night stand out. The left thumbstick controls your character's movement and the right one is used for punches. So with clever half circles of the stick you can perform a variety of punches to cause maximum damage. Then there are the special punches, the illegal moves (which regular use of causes a disqualification) and the all important dodge and block moves. The best bit is that on the screen there are no energy bars, so when seeing your boxer staggering you start to worry about how long it will be before you succumb to a knockout. At this stage the commentator will be constantly screaming in your ear that one more punch will send you tumbling to the canvas. It creates superbly tense matches with tactical punching later thrown out of the window as you go straight in waving punches around hoping to hit something. All adding up to the enormous satisfaction of seeing a replay of a punch knocking your opponent to the ground in super slow motion. To say it looks graphically superb would be an understatement, although there are a few collision detection problems present in the replays, it looks so good that you're willing to overlook these slight problems.

EA have brought their much laughed at EA servers once again to host Fight Night online. The menus themselves can be somewhat confusing at first, but you do get used to them, the main problem with the game comes from the latency found in the fights. Boxing, as with all fighting games, requires pinpoint timing with punches and dodges, but when there's a second delay with the on-screen action, it becomes a problem. Find a player with a decent connection, however, and there is much fun to be had. But ranked matches play second fiddle to the main point of online fights; nothing quite beats the brilliance of pummelling your friend whether it's online or at home. It took them a few years but it looks like EA's server problems are mostly being ironed out. Shockingly, Gamestyle has never actually been kicked out of a game, which had been a major complaint with other titles.

With a mostly competent online mode, and a lengthy and fun career, this really is the best (not to mention, only) boxing game for the Xbox 360. We're now left wondering how EA will improve on this next time, hopefully they won't venture down the ever simple rehash route and bring some other new elements to the series. If EA can guarantee this then we eagerly await Round 4.

Rating: 8 / 10

Words by Adam Gulliver