UFC 2009 Undisputed

7.9

Format Xbox 360

Developer Yukes

Publisher THQ

Genre Wrestling

9 Comments

It's a face-wrecking, bone-smashing, flesh-pounding bloodbath... in the way the real thing rarely is. Rarely does any fight go to the judges; jaws are rocked by haymakers and eyebrows are split open by razor-sharp elbows; submissions come from nowhere and high knees dislodge mouthguards from teeth as bloodstained bodies collapse onto canvas. Every fight is a hyper-real deathmatch. It's spectacular. It's overkill. The UFC isn't like this.

A refresher: in the UFC's mixed martial arts competitions matches take place over three five-minute rounds or five rounds for title fights. Bouts are ended by knockout, tap-out, or referee stoppage; fighters can use any skills they choose barring the obvious - no gouging, biting, finger or toe-snapping, headbutts, downward strikes with the elbows or kicks to a downed opponent's head. So, you're free to punch or choke a man out, or bend his arm behind him until he cries.

In the early days of Ultimate Fighting its critics branded it 'human cockfighting'. Rules were slack, with no weight-classes and fewer rules than the sport has today. A management change made the UFC and MMA in the USA more mainstream and legitimised the sport, taking it to a mainstream audience with a reality TV show and increasingly successful pay-per-views. That management change also made Undisputed - the first good MMA game in a long time - possible.

The UFC came to THQ, who in turn went to their WWE team at Yukes. Yukes, in turn, made a game which simulates the UFC to an astonishing degree on their very first attempt. Standing, the game replicates the striking game with each limb controlled by a face button, counters on the analogue stick, and trademark or preferred strikes in the left bumper; on the mat the game becomes a grappler - roll the right stick to manoeuvre around your opponent's body or squeeze out of a risky spot if your back's to the mat.

From any position you have dozens of options. Standing: do you tie up for a clinch, aim any number of different high kicks or hard bodyshots, try for a takedown or an insane Superman punch? On the mat: do you chase the submission, the ground and pound knockout, or let your opponent back up to face your superior kickboxing game?

If there's one drawback to such a high level of simulation it's the randomness of real mixed martial arts; not always does the best fighter win. A cheeky little armbar or sudden flash knockout can end a one-sided three-round drubbing in favour of the guy who's been on his back for the best part of quarter of an hour. That's exciting and unpredictable in the Octagon, but isn't always a good result in a game. Most gamers will be disappointed by the occasional seemingly random knockout or submission; MMA fans will be less surprised. It's something they'll forgive as part of the simulation that Yukes have built.

Whatever your preferred style, Undisputed supports it and has a fighter who'll work with you. Every fighter in the game is modelled with the same accuracy Yukes have invested in the fight system itself, each combatant scanned with Yukes' equipment before their big fights, catching them at the peak of their physical fitness.

And that apparent problem with overkill which sounded so much like a complaint? It really isn't. Certainly, the fighters in Undisputed spill the claret with more immediacy than almost any fighter in the UFC and fights don't go to the judges nearly so often in videogameland but nobody wants to see those fights anyway. Undisputed is hyper real in the same manner as FIFA, Madden, or Fight Night; half a dozen goals in ten minutes, fifty-yard touchdown after fifty-yard touchdown, knockout after knockout. Undisputed doesn't just want to simulate the real thing; it wants to be better than the real thing and often, it seems to manage it.

Fights look great and play beautifully but those mouthguard-launching knockouts would mean more if they came a bit less often, and the bloodshed would be more meaningful if it took a Herculean effort to bust a man open.

Yukes went a little too far, but only a little. Their fight system is near flawless bar the ease with which you can get such spectacular results; when every match is a highlight reel there's never any highlights. So, there's little to improve about Undisputed's replication of the real thing inside the Octagon. Outside, the system isn't nearly so well crafted.

Yukes have a seemingly incurable fetish for menus and options screens, some of the more extravagant options lead you down a trail some eight or nine layers deep with no apparent way to quickly exit out. Their presentation is expensive but ham-fisted; crammed with licensed music and UFC TV-styled graphics but slow to move through menus which are always difficult to navigate.

Still, menus are menus and even the worst - Project Gotham 3, for instance - barely impact upon the game in all normal circumstances - but two-thirds of UFC Undisputed's Career mode is spent with those endless, neck-deep options and menus as your companion.

You'll spend up to an hour just crafting your own fighter, so dense and needlessly elaborate are the options on offer, before entering into the UFC. It's crucial to any decent fighting game, but compared to the elegance of EA's systems in Fight Night or Tiger Woods, Yukes' late-nineties character customisation system is outdated and little more than a barrier between you and the action. If Yukes' system were more detailed the elderly systems would be forgivable but it comes up short in too many ways, even lacking a red, orange, or even a true blonde hair colour. In Fight Night, creating your boxer is a fun task; in Undisputed it's just a task, and one that's not over nearly soon enough.

In their desire to simulate the UFC Yukes have built the Career mode around training, resting, and sparring. Seven weeks before a big fight you'll allocate different types of training on a week-by-week basis, regaining stamina with a long break and burning it up with sparring and training sessions. All but the sparring is handled with a single click, and sparring is a 90-second fight in a square ring which takes longer to load than it does to play.

Let's be clear: nobody is asking for a dozen Fight Night-style bag-punching minigames. The last thing Undisputed needs is a minigame fest which you'll invariably choose to skip through anyway - it just needed to be tidied up and streamlined; made friendlier.

Worst of all, Undisputed's options are so limited you'll soon settle into a routine which you'll replicate before every big fight. If there are lots of options the systems need to be clean and simple; if there are fewer options the systems need to have depth. Undisputed offers neither and somehow hides the limited tactical depth it offers behind a piss poor front-end.

Training for a big fight here in the real world is a monumentally complicated process and there's nothing to stop Yukes going totally Football Manager with it and offering a dizzying array of training options and sparring opponents to be managed every day leading up to the big fight. Too much for you? Just hire a coach to handle all the training and let one button press auto-manage your way into the next fight.

We're not here for hack game design and 'what ifs' but this is UFC Oh-Nine. These kinds of options will find their way into future iterations of the game along with a new slickness to the menus and increased clarity for the character creation. Yukes have clearly spent every minute perfecting the fight system and bolted on the career as an afterthought; a crease to be ironed out. There are historic matches to fight and an unlockable or two but there's really no reason to play Undisputed outside of its Exhibition matches.

There's little to improve in the Octagon: a reduction to the randomness perhaps; maybe less blood split and more matches decided by endurance and tactical point-scoring above crowd-pleasing knockouts and submissions. Grappling is sometimes a little woolly and those quarter-circle rotations on the analogue stick sometimes don't work out with the result you'd expect. There's a degree of smoke and mirrors in the game at times; you'll do something good and the game will make you look better, again like FIFA or Madden. All things which will no doubt be tightened in UFC '10.

Outside the Octagon there's work to be done. UFC 2009 Undisputed may well be the best new sim fighting system of modern times, but bolted onto the barest of bare bones games. That seventy-nine down there looks cruelly shy of the eighty Undisputed very nearly earned. It's symbolic, if anything - like the game itself, so near yet so far...

Buy UFC 2009 Undisputed: Play / Amazon

Matthew Pellett