Fight Night Round 4 Review

The sweet science of boxing in Fight Night Round 4 has, much like the actual sport, been constantly under development over the years. The team at EA Canada (formerly developed at EA Chicago) may not have the game perfected, but I think anyone would be hard pressed to get as close to perfection as they have. This title does an amazing job capturing the speed and brutality of the world’s favorite gloved spectator sport. With the all-star roster, it’s just like ordering the big fight on Pay-Per-View, only with more fantasy matches and 100% more interactivity.

You may be asking yourself: “I already have Fight Night Round 3, why do I need to upgrade when it is the best boxing game I have played?” It’s simply because you haven’t had the chance to experience the boxing phenomenon that is Fight Night Round 4. Where Round 3 was sluggish and a bit bulky, Round 4 shines with insane speed and beautifully ugly brutality. The knockdowns have a more ragdollish, yet realistic look to them. You really get the feeling you just knocked some poor sap into next week when you see his eyes cross and knees buckle. Oh…and if you didn’t already know from the countless advertisements and box art posters, Mike Tyson makes his glorious video game return. Yes, he’s just as fun to use as you would think: one hit KO’s make it completely worth the $60.

The game is beautiful both visually and audibly. About as beautiful as you would expect for a game where the goal is to beat your opponent to a bloody heap. The sweat glistens in the ring lighting, the crowds cheer vigorously to get their money’s worth in bloodshed and the announcers don’t repeat the same lines over and over like with most sports games. The menu music is generic rap and hip-hop and can get a bit monotonous after a while. Luckily, that’s why there are songs on the hard drive you can play over it. Speaking of which, if you put a song in a playlist on your 360 hard drive, you can use it as your custom boxer’s entrance music.

You will definitely have enough to keep you busy game mode wise. You can set up your dream fights on Fight Now mode or relive classics (from both PPV, and your personal fights over the career) with the ESPN Classic Fight mode. You can also get online to destroy (or get destroyed by) your closest friends and worst enemies. Added to this is an extensive Legacy Mode (career mode) that lets you take your created boxer to the top of the game’s standings (not realistic standings, because fighters like Muhammad Ali and George Foreman are at the top) and become the champ. You work your way all the way from gym rat to “G.O.A.T” or Greatest of All Time.

My one gripe with the Legacy Mode, is the insane difficulty. No matter how proficient you are at trading punches, the computer will find a way to squeak by. If you want to avoid the desire to break your controller over the Fight Night Round 4 disc, you would be best suited to tone the game down to the easiest difficulty level. This not only applies to the actual fights, but the training mini-games are killer on the patience level. I found it is much easier and more beneficial to just auto-train your fighter to mediocrity rather than spend hours upon hours trying to just get him up to “really good”. Customization options for the created fighters are very in depth and will have you grinding for hours to unlock cool new gear.

Fight Night’s controls have been revamped to make the punches fly faster and more fluidly than any of the previous iterations. For a body punch, instead of holding a button, then throwing a punch like in Round 3, just move the stick like normal except using just the bottom half of the axis. This allows for much easier execution and faster counter time. The parry system has been dumped for a much more realistic counter punch system, which rewards the player for successfully bobbing and weaving by allowing for a slightly more powerful punch that has a chance of knocking the opponent down instantaneously. This is a small window of opportunity, and it takes a bit of practice to master, but the payoff is worth it when you start running on fumes late in the fight and it’s your only hope of coming out on top. At the time of writing this review, button configurations are absent from the retail game, but will be available in an update in the near future.

Yes, I’m going to use a cliche to sum up this game, and you’re going to like it. This game is a knockout boxing title. True, it may not be for every gamer out there, but for fans of boxing, as well as fans of realistic beat-em-ups, this game is well worth the $60. Personally, I’m not a big fan of either, but I did have a lot of fun with the game and found myself losing hours trying to become the champ. I highly recommend it as at least a rental, and if you have the money, go ahead and dive right in and buy it. You won’t be disappointed, and given the sales numbers, a few of your friends will already have the game. You can at least have some fun smacking them around a little bit.