UFC 2009: Undisputed Review

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Once you've bundled your creation into a fresh pair of shorts - my Dave "The Doctor" Davidson looked particularly fetching in his navy-blue full-length efforts - your UFC career can begin. The Career mode revolves around a calendar and email system. You're scheduled to fight every 10 weeks or so, with in-between weeks used primarily for training and sparring. Training requires no player input and is used to raise attributes - normally one to three points for each week. Depending on how hard a training session is undertaken - light, moderate and intense sessions are available - a certain amount of stamina is drained. Half your stamina can be restored by taking a week off to rest.

Alternatively, a week can be used to spar against an opponent in a non-competitive bout. And depending on your performance, you'll get a certain amount of points to invest in skills. The key to training before a fight is to use the weeks to build up points, crafting a fighter that will be effective for your style of play, but also making sure you've rested enough to have full stamina before the fight. Go into a ranking fight with low stamina and you'll likely be knocked out in the first round. As you gain more credibility or "cred" as a fighter, you'll also receive virtual emails offering extra fights, sponsorship deals and training sessions with renowned fighting schools - the latter is the only way to unlock new style-specific moves.

Because your fledgling fighter starts out with very low attributes and skills, they'll struggle to take down an opponent with substantially higher statistics. For example, if you win your first five fights against similarly skilled opponents, you might receive an email from Dana White offering you the chance to fight the likes of Thiago Silva. Even on the easiest difficultly setting this can be very challenging if your stats are less than half that of your opponent's. You could dominate with all your best moves for two rounds straight, then get caught in the final round with a KO punch even with a full bar of stamina.

Although the Career mode isn't massively engaging, playing through the fighting schools and learning from your mistakes is an effective path to better understanding of the gameplay. Plus once you've filled your trophy case with various trinkets, not least of which the title belt, it can be fun to see how many consecutive title defences you can manage on the harder difficulties. But the main question I keep asking myself about Undisputed is how could it better replicate the UFC experience onto the pad and screen? Apart from the ability to attempt illegal moves like a downward elbow strike or rabbit punch whilst the referee's vision is obscured, I can't really think of any.

Online matching gives the option of allowing DLC fighters. It'll be interesting to see what classic combatants Yuke's will dig up.

I do have some minor niggles outside of the fighting system. Most notable of which are the loading times. Going into an Exhibition match, whilst mashing face buttons and Start to select the default characters and skipping all the introductions, it took over one and a half minutes from when the game loaded to throwing the first punch. Installing Undisputed onto the hard drive on Xbox 360 didn't seem to make any difference either. As a point of comparison, and to make sure I'm not going off on one for no reason, Street Fighter IV only took 32 seconds for Abel to throw a punch in arcade mode. Also, although it goes with the territory, the music is an acquired taste at best. The commentary, at least, is varied and genuinely interesting to hear.

Overall, if you find UFC boring to begin with, Undisputed is unlikely to change your mind. But if you're looking for an equally tight and complex fighting game that leans towards simulation, rather than all those crazy Street Fighter IV Ultra combos, then there's a lot to like about it. That said, the ground game, in particular, is hard to judge so early. The balance of a fighting game can only truly be weighed several months after it's unleashed to the masses when it's possible to identify broken techniques that can be abused in high-level play. But first impressions so far are very promising, and Yuke's should be commended for crafting not only the best UFC game ever, but perhaps the best fighting system ever for a (wait for it) "real-life fighting simulation game".