A serious contender or a first round flop?
Training is such an important part of PrizeFighter as it allows you to improve in each area of your game.It's also arguably the most fun to be had out of an otherwise very average boxing game.Training takes the form of rhythm-based mini games in disciplines such as rope jumping, punch bag and speed bag. It’s simply a case of pressing buttons in a set sequence when the prompts appear on the screen or button-mashing furiously to achieve attribute boosts, but they’re entertaining enough - just like they were in the Rocky games - and they provide some respite from the bouts of sluggish boxing. It’s really in the ring though where Prizefighter really suffers, falling flat on its face with more force than Frank Bruno in a career-ending defeat against Mike Tyson.
The combat mechanic is deep, too deep in fact and way too complicated, with approximately 30 different combinations of punches to figure out. The first area where Prizefighter gets its wrong is the control system, choosing to map punches to the buttons on the controller instead of using the two thumb-sticks to mimic your left and right hands.
Straight punches, right and left hooks and jabs are all carried out through button presses and you can combine them, for example pressing X and A to execute an uppercut. It’s far too much hassle though. Why not just let us move the anagloue stick in a circle or up and down? As a result of over-complicating things, the fights lack the flow and rhythm of a boxing match and the realism that the developer has tried to inject so hard into the pre-match shenanigans is instantly forgotten.
A combination of triggers and the analogue stick allow you to dodge and block, but it just feels awkward moving between the analogue stick and the buttons; it’s simply not a smooth and intuitive movement.
To make matters worse, the AI is highly questionable (on both sides) and your fighter will sometimes delay his response to your button presses, something which quite simply shouldn’t be happening, but also hit-detection is simply hit or miss. It’s an unreliable game mechanic that makes you feel like you’re never really in control of your boxer.
Punches feel weighty enough and look convincing and there’s decent damage modeling to the faces of the boxers, but the animations don’t vary much from fighter to fighter and the fights for the most part feel slow and clunky. Did I mention there’s audio lag and occasionally you’ll throw a punch and then hear the sound effect a second or so after?
Click for larger imageThere are a few interesting scenarios though which do provide some entertainment, such as having to fight a guy when you’ve got a broken hand, plus there are also plenty of unlockables, such as new boxers, gloves, rings, trunks and even new songs, that should keep any collector-holics happy for while..
The audio soundtrack is excellent, with some cracking songs that you can walk out to, including the likes of Run DMC’s ‘It’s Tricky’, Survivor’s ‘Eye of the Tiger’ and even a track from the late great James Brown.
It’s not that Prizefighter lacks ideas, it does try very hard on that account to please with plenty of nice touches, including flashbacks where you get to fight in classic matches and a decent roster of fighters, of which the unlockable Rocky Marciano makes an appearance. Even its story-driven gameplay occasionally works well. The problem is that PrizeFighter gets the fundamentals wrong: the actual gameplay. This is real reason why people buy videogames. All the razzmatazz in the world can't hide the fact that the gameplay sucks more than a toothless Granny with a boiled sweet in her gob.
If the studio take the criticisms into account then there’s certainly hope for its next attempt at a boxing title, but as it stands, it’s hard to recommend a game that doesn’t get the basics right. If you want that you’ve got the Fight Night series.
Pros
Classic fights
Training is fun
Soundtrack
Cons
Gets the basic fight mechanics wrong
Tries too hard to be different, story-driven gameplay doesn’t quite work.
A failure in the ring, but not too bad outside.(5/10)
