Platform Played On: Playstation 4
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| If you're wondering, then yes, Jon Jones is pooping out the EA Sports logo. |
Rating: 6.5/10
Verdict: There's a good foundation present here, but EA UFC stumbles in a bunch of ways and is just not the MMA game I want or gamers deserve at this point.
I'm a big fan of Mixed Martial Arts, and believe that it's one of the most unpredictable sports in the world. I have played the crap out of the last bunch of MMA video games, including EA's own EA MMA. I felt that EA MMA had a good foundation for future games if they decided to make more. Sure enough, they acquired the rights to develop a UFC game... and I feel almost the exact same way that I did towards EA MMA. It's a pretty good game, with some great elements, but it also has some terrible aspects that hold it back from being the first truly great MMA game. Yes, I said it: there hasn't been a great MMA game.
The first thing that has to be talked about, and the element of the game that deserves the most praise, is the visuals and presentation. It looks and feels like a UFC event and EA has seemingly taken great care to give fans of the UFC a game that produces an authentic UFC experience. Before the fight it has the classic screen where it shows the two fighters, it has Bruce Buffer, it has all the aesthetics.
In the cage, it's more of the same. The character models are gorgeous, and you can see the sweat, veins and blood realistically rendered. When the fighters get hurt, it shows on their face. When they put a lot of force into their own attacks, it shows. People limp when you hit them with a well placed kick to their legs, but as a whole, the collision detection is a bit spotty. Sometimes they do something really silly like spin around crazily when they get hit, but that's pretty rare. For the most part, the models react as realistically as is possible at this point in gaming.
The only problem I have with how the fighters react is that sometimes you hit them with a big shot that should at the very least make them take a step back... but they don't. EA didn't want to make a game where everybody is getting knocked out in the first round, because that would cheapen the MMA experience. That's been a problem of previous games. As unflashy as decisions are, they're a natural thing in combat sports, so people should go to decisions more often than we have in previous MMA games. The only problem is, people can eat an inhuman amount of blows in order to raise the possibility of decisions. It is very possible to end it in the first round, especially on easier difficulties, but in my experience some fights should have ended quicker than they did. Sure, some people have better chins and can go to war for much longer, but sometimes this is just excessive.
When you turn on the game, the annoyance starts. You are forced to do a basic tutorial before you even get to a menu. I know games often include tutorials when they begin, but they're usually implemented in a less frustrating way. However, that's not where my main gripe is. My main gripe is that you go into the Career mode and you have to do another tutorial. Leave me alone! If I want to not understand the game, then let me be confused!
There isn't a lot to do outside of the Career mode, but let me quickly touch on the other things you can do before I go more in-depth about that. You can choose to "Fight Now," which is just an exhibition match where you can pit your created fighters against real fighters, against other created fighters, or put real fighters against real fighters. I imagine it's probably tradition for a lot of people to pick your favourite fighters and pit them against the ones you hate. Or, relive old feuds like I do.
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| Such as this one... only in my world, Nick Diaz pounded on GSP. I even took him down. |
You can do the challenges, but those are just tutorials to help you learn how to play. They have all these tutorials but there's no easy way to just look up how to do something in-game. As far as I know, you have to go to their site.
But outside of those things, there's not a lot you can do. You can't create tournaments to play against the computer, so you either just fight now or start a career.
The career is about what you'd expect if you have played a UFC game before, but it's not nearly as interesting as the previous UFC game. In the previous game, you could at the very least choose your fights, choose to fight in Pride, etc. Hell, even Fight Night had a much better career mode. In comparison, EA Sports UFC seems basic and because of this, it seems more repetitive. You are given fights, you get fans, you train, you level up your character and you buy him moves with the points you earn in training. These points are also used in raising your attributes, where are separated into stand-up, ground and submission tiers. This is all stuff you've done before, but I do like the way that this game allows you to allocate your points... it's very Fight Nightish and I love Fight Night.
There's also something called "Abilities," which is basically just game planning. You choose up to five different things to boost your character, such as making his punches hurt more or losing less stamina. I like this more than the way the previous UFC game handled game planning, and I feel that as a whole, it's much easier to develop a fighter that stands a chance against the computer.
One thing that EA MMA had that I wish they would have included in this one is the ability to do the training once and then just simulate the same results, so you didn't have to constantly do the same thing in order to get points. I get it: mixed martial artists are constantly grinding to improve, but as a game mechanic, I've always disliked this aspect in combat sports games. You can skip the training but you won't get the points, and EA MMA did a wonderful job in rectifying this by allowing you to get an A in training and just simulate those As over and over.
I wish they copied the other UFC games by allowing you to level up individual things like submissions, strikes or transitions. It really gave me a sense of pride to say that this particular submission was a death trap. Instead, the moves you can acquire are laid out in a more streamlined -- thus, better -- way and you can easily choose which ones to learn, and you get them instantly. For as complicated as they make the controls -- more on that later -- I actually felt like this game suffered from the same thing that EA MMA did, though not quite as much: there actually isn't enough variety to separate your CAFs (created fighters) from one another. In previous MMA games, I never made a fighter that was like another one of my fighters, but in this one, that would be a lot more likely.
My experience with the career was an intense love affair that got really stale at the end. You start at TUF -- The Ultimate Fighter, which is a tournament of sorts that the UFC has been using for years now -- which is actually a neat way to start. You fight your way into the house and then you fight the other people in the house. The bullshit meathead "let me bang bro" drama is not included in the package which is nice, though now I wonder if playing an MMA Life Simulator would be fun.
Anyway.
After you win TUF, you fight on the undercard with hopes of getting to the main card. In between fights, you're constantly bombarded with video packages explaining things like submissions, UFC debuts, KOs, etc. You're also force-fed fighters constantly congratulating you on winning... sometimes to humorous results like seeing the same fighter twice in a row, or a fighter calling you up to say good job after you just beat his ass. Or maybe someone says, "Hey, it's Ronda Rousey again" when they've never talked to you before in your life. Even though you can skip all of these, I actually hate that they're included at all. I understand that EA's m.o. these days is to give you a look into the life of these athletes, but I just want to play a game.
The career was fine up until a certain point. I slowly built my way up to a championship, but I fought the same few real fighters over and over. I was a welterweight, and I never got to have wars with people like Nick Diaz, or Carlos Condit. I am forgiving of this, but it got really terrible when all the real fighters retired and I found CAFs over and over. It was the Arlovski/Sylvia era all over again as I pummeled the same few guys repeatedly, just getting bored and sloppy as time went on. It makes sense that fighters would retire, but this put a damper on the entire thing.
I do like how they handle your own retirement though, because there's a longevity bar that fills up as time progresses. Once it's done filling, Dana will tell you you're done and that's that. It's a much better system than having a set number of fights, because it adds to the realism. If you're a balls-to-the-wall fighter who takes a lot of damage (like Shogun), you will suffer from this. If you're basically an MMA Floyd Mayweather, then you'll last longer. I got almost fourty fights out of my CAF.
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| Speaking of which... he's the guy on the left and this was taken when I was the reigning champ. You just haven't heard of Schmidt yet... |
I think this is the first combat sports game in a long time that I probably won't go back and play through again as a different style. I didn't play it on a hard difficulty so I know I'd get less points if I did, but on the default difficulty, by the end of it I was a 100 rating. I just lack the interest to go back and do this again.
Once you get to the actual fighting EA Sports UFC is littered with flaws... some of them bigger than others, but some are little things that every MMA game should have by default. The problems I mentioned above about having legendary chins is true, but there is more to it.
My biggest problem since the demo has been that at times, it plays more like what a non-MMA fan thinks MMA would be since it's "martial arts." The movesets of some fighters is ridiculous and they do things they shouldn't be doing. It's like EA wanted to make it as flashy as possible, and they helped make this possible by having a stupid modifier system. What was broken about the way EA handled striking in their previous game, or the way the modifiers worked in other games? Nothing. Not a damn thing. But yet EA decided to add an awkward extra modifier (R1) which was just a poor idea. We don't need a million different strikes, because MMA fighters don't have them either, unless they're Jon Jones or Anderson Silva. Why is Gus doing crazy kicks? He's a textbook boxer. Why does everybody have a suplex that nobody does that is ripped straight from pro-wrestling?
The controls leave a little to be desired. In trying to give us a game where we can have more variety -- which I still say was handled fine in previous games because not every MMA fighter attemps anaconda chokes -- they've made the controls a little too complicated. Now that you can choose different limbs when attempting a submission, you have to hold a button, press the direction and then do a quarter turn, instead of simply hitting R3 in previous games. That's just one example. The controls are serviceable but they weren't broke in previous games, so they didn't need to be fixed.
Speaking of submissions, I'm not entirely sure how I feel about the system in this one. I actually liked the EA MMA system because limb submissions were a battle of button-mashing vs stamina management which I felt made sense. They also had chokes where you had to hit the "sweet spot." There was variety but the mini-games never took me out of the action. I despised the submission system in the previous UFC game, but not as much as I hated the submission game in the UFC game prior to that one.
In EA Sports UFC, they wanted to simulate how submissions go in real-life. They wanted different stages, and they wanted the mini-game to reflect that. If you're attempting a submission, you press the right stick in the same direction that you opponent does in order to stop him. When an L flashes on the screen, you press the left stick in that direction to "lock in" the sub and proceed to the next level. It sounds more complicated than it is, and I get that submissions have different levels to them, but this doesn't factor in that sometimes submissions happen really quickly. Why is every guillotine choke taking me three or four different levels? Why is a minute battle? Guillotine chokes often get locked in almost instantly. Five seconds later, the guy has passed out. It's not a terrible sub system, but they would have been better just re-using or tweaking the EA MMA one.
While the stand-up/clinch is fine (outside of sub-par controls) the ground game is still where EA needs to improve. EA MMA had a functional system in place, and EA Sports UFC is better, but it's still a little silly at times. For example, if you are mounted fully, you can press a button and you lift your opponent up and use a butterfly guard to push them off. This happens so rarely in MMA it's laughable. The ground game is still focused on turning your right stick in quarter circle turns, so they haven't changed it a lot, but they just need to evolve it and allow more positions. The ground game should be dynamic and complex. Like EA MMA, there's a good foundation there and I have hope for the next game in the series.
From my experience, the AI is a little too aggressive, but I guess it's a video game. You aren't going to get the really technical battles from a video game at this point, so for the most part the AI was fine... except this one fight where I fought BJ Penn and he literally spammed takedowns: 76 to be exact. I know people will complain about the AI, but honestly, it's decent. They don't appear to do anything really stupid, even on the easier difficulties. AI is one of the hardest things about making a game so I am generally pretty lenient with it.
EA Sports UFC is not a bad game, it just hasn't found its legs yet. This is their second MMA game, so perhaps it should have been better, but I have no doubt that the third will be much better because the mechanics are solid and they just need to build on it effectively.
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