Don King Presents: Prizefighter

By Alan Bell

EA's Fight Night series really set the benchmark for expectations of what a boxing game can deliver - particularly in the graphics department. Not only did they set expectations, they set them really high. Unassailably so, you might think. 2K Sports don't back down from a challenge (just check out how they continually rebuff EA's attempts to buy them for an example) and they've decided to go head to head with EA's Fight Night by bringing out a big-budget boxer of their own, backed by legendary promoter Don King.

Firing up the pre-release code, we were immediately impressed by the polish that's gone into the user interface. 2K Sports have been making sports games for a long time and their experience really shows even before you start punching people.

Kicking off a new career, we found ourselves in the middle of a boxing documentary. Real video, with real boxing celebrities, talking about some legendary fighter and when they first encountered him. After a few minutes, we came to the realisation that they were talking about us; just as they get to the bit where they refer to us by name, the character creation interface kicks in.

With slots for up to five player-created characters available, we selected the top one and dove in. The level of customization you can go to using this interface is unbelievable. There are dozens of screens of settings for just the face, broken down into sections for the nose, chin, jowls and such like, as well as standard options like hair and skin colour.

If it sounds daunting, stress not - 2K Sports have broken the options down into sensible sets of options, each of which can be manipulated using just the analogue sticks. Moving around the pages is accomplished with the shoulder buttons and triggers, and you can go forward or backwards at any time. Find something you like but would work better with a different nose? No problem, just go back and change it.

If you can't be bothered with this stuff or don't care what your fighter looks like, there's a "Random" button that you can use at the top level to randomize everything or you can press it on most of the sub screens to randomize that set of sub options.

All in all, it's a very nice suite of customization options that really allows you to create a fighter that looks like anyone you want it to. None of the options, even in this pre release build, "broke" the visual cleanliness, with no ugly artifacting or any other weirdness that can come from highly customizable character editors.

Continuing on after creating a character, more video sets the scene before you're ultimately dropped in a training ring to learn the ropes of basic boxing. The controls are straight forward - left stick moves your fighter around (you can double-tap the stick in any direction to dart in that direction, good for moving around quickly) whilst the face button (or combinations thereof) perform the basic punches and the trigger / shoulder buttons modify those punches (such as LT + a face button to perform a body shot, etc). Moving the right stick blocks whilst modified right stick performs dodges.

You also have three powerbars to be concerned with: a health guage (pretty straightforward what this is all about), a stamina guage (you use this up punching) and a power guage. The power guage builds up as you land punches - if you're familiar with how the later Street Fighter power guages work, you'll get to grips with this one straight away: this is what you use to fire off a signature move, a super-power punch (of which there are 40 available to be unlocked, we're told) which will do extra damage if it lands.

Fighting starts off pretty straightforward, with your first actual fight being against a fairly straight-shooting kind of guy whose guard isn't hard to get around and who will drop to the mat after a relatively light pounding. As you progress, however, fighters will telegraph their moves less and less and start bringing in clever shots that counter your own punches; learning how to come in from the side, break their guard and clinical use of your powerbars becomes essential.

The game is based around an office hub, in which you can plan your fights, communicate with promoters / sponsors, plan your training session and just generally manage your career. There's a lot more to it than just punching people in a chain of fights - planning when you train, how long you train for and how much rest you get between fights all feeds in to how well you do and how easy each fight will be.

Graphically the game is very impressive. Some of the detail is lower than you might expect, coming from a Fight Night Round 3 background, but the overall package is very nice indeed. Sweat beading on the players, blood & sweat particles exploding from every hit and all the important textures are very high res and look great in HD. Sure, some of the background textures are a bit low res and some of those get up close to the camera sometimes (particularly odd given those times are during a canned animation where the developers knew it was going to be - perhaps they'll clean those textures up prior to release...) but for the most part, it's a tight visual package.

The animation system is very impressive; the fighters all have real weight to them and link up their various movements (whether they be punches, dodges or just movements around the ring) with super fluidity. They're also very aware of where they are in the ring, where their opponent is and what they're up to. The way they telegraph their moves, fall to the mat after a devastating right hook or just react to punches landing is all very smooth and realistic.

If you're a boxing fan, this is shaping up to be something special and not just because of its inclusion of all those real boxing personalities. It's fun and feels like a solid boxing experience both in and out of the ring. Stay tuned for our full preview and review of the game following its early July release down under.

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