Fight Night Round 4 (PlayStation 3)

To the untrained eye, boxing involves little more than two fighters punching each other until one of them falls down. There's a lot more to the sport than that, though, and Fight Night Round 4 is a game that, while not necessarily realistic, encourages you to think about every punch you throw in much the same way a real boxer does. The action is fast-paced, the career mode really sucks you in, and there are some neat online options to boot. On the flip side, the career mode places too much importance on frustrating training minigames, and all too often opponents in ranked online matches suck the fun out of the fight by mindlessly spamming punches. Regardless, Fight Night Round 4 is a great boxing game, and one that improves upon its predecessor despite a few noticeable shortcomings.

Playing through the tutorial only takes a minute or two, and is a gret way to familiarize yourself with the controls.

From the moment you start playing, it's clear that Fight Night Round 4 is a unique animal. Some of the controls will feel familiar if you played Round 3, but as you play through the brief-but-adequate tutorial it becomes apparent that this year's action has a much more organic feel. Almost nothing about the fighters' movements feels scripted, so you need to look for openings before throwing punches, and every time you flick or rotate the right analog stick to throw a punch, any number of things can happen. Your punch might catch your opponent off guard and stun him temporarily, it might glance off the side of his head doing very little damage, your arm might become entangled with your opponent's as he tries to throw a punch at the same time, you might miss completely and leave yourself open, and so on. Furthermore, if your opponent manages to perfectly time a block or dodge move, the action will slow down for a moment as he's given the opportunity to land a powerful counterattack. It's a great gameplay mechanic that doesn't interfere with the flow of the fight and that encourages you to place as much importance on defense as on offense.

Boxers in Round 4 are capable of throwing a lot more punches in each round than their real-life counterparts, but that caveat aside, fights play out in an impressively believable fashion. In a fight that lasts 10 three-minute rounds, for example, it's not uncommon for the momentum to shift from one fighter to the other as fatigue, heavy punches, and different strategies all play their part. Also deserving of a mention is the ingenious new corner system introduced this year. In between rounds, you get to spend points on replenishing your stamina and health and on repairing damage, and the number of points that you get to spend is determined by different aspects of your performance in the previous round. For example, you earn points for having a high percentage of your punches find their target, for avoiding your opponent's punches, for stunning or knocking down your opponent, and even for managing to get back to your feet via a first-person minigame after hitting the canvas. It's a great system, because it acknowledges that a boxer throwing five times as many punches as his opponent isn't necessarily throwing better punches, and so while he may well earn more points from the judges, he's also going to expend a lot more stamina, and if many of his punches are being blocked or dodged, he's handing his opponent more to points to spend in his corner at the end of the round.

There are more than 40 instantly recognizable professional pugilists on the Round 4 roster, and that number is growing thanks to users who are taking the time to create them as custom fighters and share them online. Zab Judah, Evander Holyfield, Danny Williams, and Floyd Mayweather are just a handful of the fighters who have been brilliantly re-created using photos uploaded to the EA Sports World Web site, along with all manner of celebrities. The powerful toolset for creating custom fighters is easy to use, but satisfying results are much easier to achieve by uploading digital photos to the aforementioned site than by using the console's own camera. Whichever method you choose, the head generated using a frontal and a profile photo requires some major tweaking afterward, but the rewards are well worth the effort--especially if you're keen to play through the Legacy career mode as yourself.

The lengthy career mode kicks off with an amateur tournament. Note the headgear.

In Legacy mode, your chosen fighter starts out as a "bum" at the bottom of his 50-strong weight class. Your goal, of course, is to work your way up to number one and claim the title belt, but Round 4 takes several steps beyond that as well. After winning your chosen division and earning the rank of champion, you're really only about halfway to achieving your full potential, because in addition to defending your title, there are other belts in other weight classes up for grabs. The criteria for retiring as a Hall of Famer, a ring legend, or the greatest of all time are numerous, and not for the fainthearted. Examples include maintaining a win percentage of over 95 percent across dozens of fights, defending a title successfully as many as eight times, and holding three championship belts simultaneously. The road to achieving that kind of success is long, which is a good thing, save for those occasions when obstacles on the road seem unnecessary or are just the result of bad design.

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