Fight Night Round 3

We just posted our Fight Night Round 3 review and, while our final score might surprise, the reasonining for that score shouldn't. The third Fight Night game is yet again a superbly playable game that features, at least on the Xbox 360 game, some of the most astonishing graphics yet seen on the console. Yet for all its power, it falls short of its predecessor.

In a way, Fight Night has become a victim of the its own success. The first two games were such radical departures from EA's stiff, stale Knockout Kings games that they felt like entirely new and fresh experiences. The introduction of the analog punching mechanics and ever increasing graphical realism has kept the series vital for three games. But as the series' mechanics have become increasingly familiar--and its flaws increasingly apparent--has a similar sense of weariness crept into the ring? The career mode still feels too much like a series of one-off fights, the training mechanics haven't changed a whit, and the abhorrent and omnipresent in-game advertising only serves to aggravate.

Fight Night Round is undoubtedly a great game, one that will keep you plugged into your PS2, Xbox, or 360 for a long time. Still the pessimist in me wonders if, years from now, will we look at Fight Night Round 3 in hindsight as the game in which the series began its downhill slide towards mediocrity, or merely a hitch in the series' legacy of greatness? Will Fight Night eventually become the Knockout Kings of this console generation, only to be replaced by something bigger and better in the future? Or will the series find its second wind and reclaim that innovative spirit that's defined it for so long? It's simply too soon to tell...