Just to start off, I’m probably biased, ever since I first saw Royce Gracie in action; I’ve loved UFC, just because of Joyce! Oh, how I adore Royce, he practices Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, submission martial arts pretty much, and his family is super famous, like none of them have ever lost a fight, all the way back to his great grandpa, who invented fucking Vale Tudo!!! Holy shit!!! And that’s something that disappointed me, no Royce, maybe he didn’t want his likeness rights in there or maybe he isn’t a part of it anymore, but I was disappointed.
Alrighty, about the game, its not a fight game, it’s a fight simulator, don’t expect fireballs and shit like that, if at any time a character breaks another’s bone, you don’t lose a little life, you lose the fight. It’s pretty damn realistic or so it would appear, I've been in one fight and it was a lot more pathetic than these but it goes down how I would have liked mine to go. The controls are pretty basic, as well as the moves and reversals and that’s what I think makes me like it too, five minutes in I could beat arcade mode, so I was pretty happy. Five minutes you ask? Well I can still lose on the first stage too though, the game is won with submissions in my mind and they can come out of nowhere, if you get stunned, even if you’re just blocking you can lose a match. I couldn’t have made a more fitting fighting system for this game, they pretty much figured out perfectly how to make a game out of it.
Moving on, visual and audio wise, I think this counts, the opening movie, oooh, does it look painful and fit in with the game, its real clips and really brutal looking, so good job there developers. The graphics while fighting are pretty damned nice; they look like who they are, wow, that’s confusing sounding. They look awesome in action, the transition, punches, throws, kicks, and all that shit looks really fluid and just plain nice. Here comes a complain, when you’re in a tournament or in versus, you moving to the ring looks so, sooooooo, sooooooooooo bad. Some of the angles don’t look as horrible, but the front on one looks just, I'm getting a little angry now. Umm, this sounds bad but I don’t remember any of the music, umm, it’s good! The sounds are usually pretty good, flesh smashing against flesh sounds good most of the time, but when you win by submission, during the replay, when you put pressure on joint, break bone, or what have you, they make this annoying “errrrrrrrr” noise some of the time, its loud and weird and just sort of, loud.
I like the custom player thing so far, its clever, I’m not sure if its inventive but I haven’t seen a system like it anywhere else, I don’t want to go into too much detail, so I wont. One thing I don’t fancy about it is the lack of customizing you can do, you can change; height, weight, 4 skin colors, 4 costume colors. That’s pretty damn basic. Wrapping up, definitely worth renting, and rent it before you decide to buy it if you do.
