Pugnacious Pugilists

Round 2 adds a ton of improvements and new features to the winning Fight Night formula.

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Fight Night 2004 was by almost every account the most realistic boxing game to date. So how do you top perfection? That's the question the developer behind Fight Night Round 2 has asked for the past year following the first game's release. Now that we're a month away from the sequel's release, we recently got a chance to spend some quality time with Round 2 and have found it to be coming together better than fans might have hoped for.

Fight Night Round 2 features several different modes of play, including online, hard hits, and the expected single-player career. One of the big wishes players had last year was for the ability to change weight divisions while going through the career mode to capture belts in multiple weight classes. Luckily, this wish has been granted in Round 2. Players can now dip into weight classes above and below their own in attempts to hold all three belts at once. Another welcome change to the career mode is that fighters now have the ability to try to stay in the game as long as possible, without having to worry about being forcibly retired. The trick, as in real life, is having a fighter who, at the age of 49 or so, can actually muster what it takes to defend or regain a title. Through proper management and training regimens, which include such favorites from Fight Night 2004 as heavy bag and combo dummy exercises, you'll have to see how many fights you can pull a fighter through victoriously.

Fight Night Round 2 includes pugilists from six weight classes: featherweight, lightweight, welterweight, middleweight, light heavyweight, and heavyweight. Most of the boxers included in Round 2's roster are current contenders from today's era, such as Marco Antonia Barrera, Erik Morales, Diego Corrales, Arturo Gatti, Jessie James Leija, Floyd Mayweather Jr., Shane Mosley, Ricardo Mayorga, Jermain Taylor, Roy Jones Jr., Antonio Tarver, and Evander Holyfield. In addition, the game includes a small number of classic fighters as well, including the likes of Muhammad Ali, Jake LaMotta, Ray Robinson, Roberto Duran, and Ray Leonard. Fans of last year's Fight Night will undoubtedly cheer for the additions to the roster, but they'll likely be disappointed by some notable absences this time around, namely Felix Trinidad and Lennox Lewis.

Luckily, the create-a-champ mode is even more capable of creating fighters to your exact specifications than it was last year. The tools to create a custom fighter this time around rival those the designers used to build the real fighters in the game. Players can sculpt a fighter's physique using the two thumbsticks. The left one molds muscle, while the right one molds fat. You can choose from different hairstyles, shoe colors, trunks, gloves, and protective equipment. With all the options included, you'll be able to create a fighter that looks just about any way you could want.

The new game has a massive lineup of current and classic champs.

One of the most noticeable additions to Round 2 is the new cut-man system, which lets you play the role of a cut man as he tries to keep the punch-induced swelling and cuts of his fighter to a minimum. Once a round comes to an end, you can use the left thumbstick to choose one of four specific areas you want to work on. You can then arch the right thumbstick in time with the movement indicator to maximize your swelling- or cut-reduction efforts. If your fighter sustains too much damage to the face, such as an eye that's swollen shut or vision that's impaired dramatically by a cut, for instance, the fight will be stopped. This new element of having a fight stopped due to career-damaging injuries truly adds a whole new dynamic of gameplay to Round 2 that wasn't in the original. Now you can specifically target an opponent's injured eye, just like a real fighter would in real life, to force a stoppage in the fight to earn a subsequent win.

In the gameplay department, Fight Night Round 2 builds on the exquisite control scheme featured in last year's game. The biggest additions come in the form of added abilities, such as those that let you clinch, let you move while punching, and let you vary the power of your hooks and uppercuts. The clinch gives a fighter who's just about to hit the canvas one last chance to grab on to survive the round. Much like a grab move in a fighting game, players in Fight Night Round 2 can grab on to regain a bit of health in hopes of staving off a knockdown. The ability to move while punching makes all the difference in the world, because it gives the game a much more even and realistic back-and-forth pace that works at range as well as inside.