UFC: Sudden Impact

PS2 review by Jim Smith - Monday 7th June 2004

So let's get this straight. In Ultimate Fighting Championship you take two muscle bound madmen in pants - right - drop them into a large, caged octagonal wrestling ring - yeah - and watch eagerly as they knock seven colours of crap out of each other in a no holds barred, anything goes contest of pure aggression. Wow - TV doesn't get much better than that. What started off as a one-off event back in 1993 has turned into a commercial phenomenon and rightly so since there was an obvious gap in the market for this kind of thing. I mean, boxing is okay but more often than not boxers get knackered half way through the bouts and end up doing that thing where they hug each other until the referee pulls them apart. Wrestling is quite funny, but it's as staged as watching a kung-fu movie, so how do you watch real exciting fighting? The answer is UFC. We've had this beast for over a decade now (I believe we're on UFC 47 or 48?) and we even have the imitators on US TV in the form of Tough Man, Pride and American Gladiators, although the last one in that list might be pushing it a bit.



The video game incarnation has been around for a while too, starting over four years ago now back on the doomed Dreamcast. That version of UFC was a decent game and quite a showcase for the DC console's graphical prowess. I'd like to say that this incarnation is a natural evolution of the franchise, building on the game's strong potential, but sadly I can't. If anything, the DC version is a little better in both the graphics and the game play departments, which is a little worrying. Even last year's Tap Out on the Xbox, which was also essentially the same game, is better than this PS2 translation, but with Sony continuing to fumble the ball and watch it's considerable lead over the Xbox gradually shrink, I think you kind expected that.

UFC: Sudden Impact isn't that bad a game though, not by any means, so let's go over the format for the uninitiated out there. Essentially, each of the main buttons (square, circle, triangle and X) represents one of the fighter's limbs in exactly the same way as they do in Tekken. The D-pad obviously controls the fighter's movement around the octagon and jump is left out because, let's face it, no one should be jumping in a fighting game any more now the 3D revolution is over a decade old.



The actual fighting engine uses the tried and tested Tekken model, like I just said. Each button is a punch or kick with combinations of buttons bringing out a few different moves. The most immediate of these is the grapple; hit right punch and right kick together (or alternatively both left buttons) and your fighter will grab his opponent and invariably bring him to the ground and sit on him. From here several different things can happen depending on who's faster on the buttons. Either the opponent flips you off (if he hammers all buttons fast enough), or he flips you over and pins you (achieved by taping the double left or double right buttons, I think). Alternatively, you can flip him over and try and get a tap out (again achieved by taping the double left or double right buttons, I'm pretty sure), or you can just pound your punch and kick buttons randomly and beat the guy senseless. I usually favour the last option.

So that covers the four buttons and both rights or both left, but there are a couple more tricks to learn. Tapping both punches together at just the right time enables you to catch your opponent's punch (like Jun used to back in Tekken 2) and this is extremely useful for upsetting an opponents flow. Obviously, hitting both kicks at the right time catches kicks, but I'm sure you guessed that already. The last feature of the double-button system is triggered when you tap the two opposites, i.e. triangle and X together or circle and square. These combinations allow you to perform duck-away feints, which are quite useful moves because you can usually tag a punch or a kick on the end to begin your counter attack.



Now this all may sound good on paper but in practice it gets a bit boring, because two glaring problems become obvious as soon as you start playing. Firstly, all the fighters look remarkably similar since they're all just big, muscle-bound freaks in pants. This makes each bout look a bit samey - something that's helped along by the drab octagonal arenas you have to fight in. The second problem lies with the bouts themselves because they all tend to play out like a Tekken fight of King versus King (you remember - the wrestling guy with the tiger mask), but played by two novices. You see, what happens is both guys trade clumsy slaps until one grabs the other, pins him and slaps him around on the floor for a few seconds until the other guy breaks free. Then you're back to the clumsy slapping again and a repeat of the grabbing and pummelling on the floor business until one of the guys is knocked out. And that's about it. There are exceptions, the odd funky reversal or flip-over tap out spices things up, but they are exceptions and don't seem to happen enough.

There are a lot of modes, though; championship, arcade, versus, training, and they all do their respective job, but the mode which revels in it's own uselessness is the story mode. It is, at best, monotonous. This mode begins with you creating a fighter and then training him for three years to be the best that he can be, picking between a handful of dojos offering different martial arts disciplines every year. Sadly, it's just not as good as it sounds. For a start, nearly all the fighter template faces look remarkably similar albeit with either white, black or Hispanic skin colouring. The build of your guy is pretty much looks the same no matter how radical you try to make it; in the end he just looks like a big meathead no matter how hard you try to avoid that UFC stereotype, but I've commented on that glaring problem already. When you actually start training you realise that the training 'missions' are nothing short of lame. 'Hit your opponent twice with punch!' 'Perform a kick!' 'Perform two kicks!' That's it. You have to do two so-called missions a month, then you get the option to save or carry on. Occasionally you get to 'play' against some NPC opponent, but the actual match is represented by your character punching the air on the right hand side of the screen until you hit X, at which point you are told 'Well done!' and on to the next monotonous training month. I mean, really.



At the end of each training year you get to enter a tournament, which is a welcome bit of actual game action, but how well you do doesn't seem to influence the course of your training at all, so it feels like there's little point. This is a crying shame; when you're playing a game and thinking, 'They really didn't think this through,' it often prompts me to flip the disc out and play something less boring instead.

In fact, that's just what I did. UFC: Sudden Impact is a very average fighting game in a market cluttered with good alternatives, so I can't really recommend it. I'll be saving my review copy for the occasional blow off of post-pub steam, but that's about it. It's a shame, I have a feeling there's a market for an overly brutal fighting game in the same way that UFC filled in that real life gap, but Sudden Impact doesn't have that little bit extra that a triple 'A' title should.

Thunderbolt score: six out of ten

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