You better enjoy flash knockdowns, cause you're about to experience 173 of them.
This is the official "I'm not a Fight Night fanboy so I can review games correctly" review.
*******The Good*******
-the graphics are a slight improvement
-the champion mode is an interesting angle and keeps the fights coming without all that nonsense mini-game training
-the opponents actually feel like significant boss battles and not just another random template
-ESPN cut scenes are a nice touch and add some realism
*******The Bad (lots of bad)*******
-the controls are clunky as hell and sometimes my guy will start weaving and throwing punches for 5 seconds while I'm just holding the controller
-weaving, blocking, and throwing punches are more like suggestions to your fighter than actions. Block, and you have about a 30% chance of actually blocking the punch. Weave or throw a punch combo, and maybe sometime in the next 8 seconds, your fighter will get around to it. One time, I knocked a dude out and he did a slow fall down, and my guy was off in the corner still throwing punches while the ref was counting.
-they took out the "wind up" part of the power punches so now your finger permanently glued to the RB
-most of the knockout punches completely miss, made all the more obvious in the slow-mo replay. One time I throw it uppercut and it nicked the guy's ear, and yet it still made the same god awful "fisting a jar of petroleum jelly" sound effect from the previous games
-I swear to christ the ref is there for the sole purpose of getting in the way of the camera. He's certainly not there to break up clinches, cause I've been forced to slow dance through half the fight and he did nothing
-each opponent has some specific attribute that you must exploit to win... and it's just f***ing ridiculous. "The guy who runs away" literally runs from you the whole fight and clinches when you get close. "The guy with the big left hook" will flash KO you with any connected left hook. That's right. Enjoy getting knocked down by one punch over and over. It's like a half-assed Mike Tyson's Punch Out. I can almost see King Hippo stepping in the ring. "You gotta hit him in the stomach, champ!"
-Punches are worthless in this game. I throw nothing but power counter punches over and over for 8 rounds and they have no cuts or anything to show for it.
-Frost, "the main boss fight" is the biggest pain in the ass you've ever faced. You run from him for 2 rounds... with any punch landed knocking you down (what is this Tyson's Punch Out again?). Then you have to "land 75 power body shots" for the next 3 rounds... only every time you try to punch you get knocked the f**k out. Blocks literally do nothing. And Frost throws a haymaker roughly every 1.3 seconds nonstop. I changed it to super easy difficulty and I got knocked down 3 times on 3 punches.
So you spend the whole fight running, throwing a haymaker, and running some more. By the time it's over you really don't feel like you beat the champion's ass... you feel like you're a little pansy who happens to have gotten lucky.
-Spoiler part-
Every part of this game is stolen. I mentioned the Tyson's Punch Out. Did I also mention your trainer is an old white haired man named Cus (that's right... real original). They stole from Rocky 2 (the washed up fighter doing grunt work and getting disrespected in the gym), they stole from Rocky 5 (I signed with the evil promoter cause he can give me a shot at the title), and they almost stole from Rocky 4, only the brother survived. When it cut to a shot of Frost, I almost expected him to go "if he dies, he dies." And watch the movie The Hurricane and tell me that they didn't steal the plot AND the character design.
-and instead of making your character even slightly interesting looking, EA settled on the usual. The average sized, non threatening black man with a buzz cut motif. How very risque of them. They went the Denzel Washington route so that they could connect with as many people as possible with their generic waste of an opportunity.
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You will scream bull**** at your tv after your 17th consecutive flash KO and you will long for the simpler days of Fight Night 3... the last one they got right. I put this on ebay the day after I bought it.
edit: oh, and career mode is just imported from FN4. Until another company starts making boxing games and challenges EA to get better, they will just continue to phone it it
another edit: the judges are in the opponent's pocket. And I don't mean the fight where they are literally bought off, I mean every single fight of the game. I took Tyson, chased the opponent around the ring hitting him with huge weaving counter power punch after another, stunned him 5 or 6 times, had him at 20% damage and me at 0%... and I lost every round 8 to 10 in what the commentators called "an easy one to score."