Best fighting game I have ever played
The best part of this game is easily the feeling of punching someone in the head. The game just nails the weight and damage done by each good strike. I jumped to my feet when I caught Rampage Jackson with an elbow to the chin in the 3rd round sending him to the mat and me to the #1 contender spot in the light heavyweight division :)
Overall the fighting in this game is fantastic. Grappling is well done (some minor issues with timing counters), ground and pound works well as you try to gain full mount. And as said earlier nothing beats catching someone right on the button with a solid strike.
Possibly the most surprising part of this game is how much I enjoy losing fights. Usually I play sports games on a skill level that I know I can dominate each game on. However with Undisputed I don't care. I have the skill level set to the 2nd highest (forget the name of it), and my fighters record of 19-9-0 tells me that it is set correctly. The best part of losing is each time you learn something about your fighter. What you need to train up, or what you need to stop doing. For example, I lost consecutive fights to Chuck Liddel, both times I was KO'd by a superman punch after missing a high kick. Lesson learned, stop throwing random high kicks.
There are a few things keeping this from a perfect 10 in my books. First off is the menu system. Although I don't think this should actually hurt the score of the video game I would like to see GSP beat the crap out of the developer that said "Hey, lets make everything appear at a 45 degree angle." I'm going cross eyed trying to read some of these menu screens.
My only real complaint is their are not enough challengers before you start fighting UFC caliber fighters. I just lost back-to-back title fights to Rashad Evans. Although I lost there is no way my fighter deserved these fights. My overall is 71. In the light heavyweight division this makes me the worst fighter available in exhibition mode by 5 overall points. I think the game needs more made-up people to fight early in your career so that when you do start fighting UFC fighters you are a UFC caliber fighter. I would say start at rank 40, instead of 25.
I have limited experience online, I only tried one fight and was disconnected late in the third round so I can not really rate that part of the game, but I bought this game for career mode and local multiplayer so I really don't care what the online mode is like anyway.
It is currently 3 a.m and although I should be going to bed I won't. This game will keep me up all night. Hell my 2 losses to Evans dropped me from #2 to #7 overall. Gotta get that back.
Buy this game. It's awesome. I don't care that I will not have money to buy Infamous on day 1. I'll wait 2 weeks and buy it at my next pay cheque. UFC 2009 Undisputed will keep me occupied until then.