Most fighting games look and play very similarly. Two fighters move around a semi 3d arena, doing their best to hit the opponents. The moves are usually limited to high and low punches of various styles and it’s near impossible to find a game where you can’t block in some way or another. At first glance someone might think Fight Night Round 3 is the same “old thing”. That someone couldn’t be more wrong though!

Hit him hard!

A FNR newbie will probably notice straight away that there is no health gauge when fighting. This is very uncommon for a fighting game. And even though this classical display can be toggled on, you lose a lot of the immersion by enabling it and don’t gain all that much information in return. So yes, you’ll be able to read how tired your fighter is, but you’d just as easily gauge that from his expression and speed of his breathing. Injuries? If a number tells you more than a glaringly obvious bruise on his left cheek and some severe swelling under his right eye, then sure, go ahead and turn on the stats display. By the way, the commentator also does a good job of predicting knockouts, so you can use his comments against your opponent as well.

Why would you have to do that though? Matches only last a minute or so, don’t they? They do not. A single round may only last 3 minutes, but when two good fighters are at each other’s throats a single match can last for over 30 minutes! The length of the spars is also one of the major reasons that the dynamic is so drastically different from other fighting games. You will seldom be able to down your opponent in the first round, let alone knock him out for good. I’ve played tons of matches on and offline, and except for the early fights against the AI, all the matches went on for at least 5 rounds, some even 10. But how can fights actually last that long?

Staying Power

Regardless of who you choose to fight as, he gets tired as he is swinging punches. He also loses some stamina when defending, so turtle tactics won’t always work. Because of stamina most matches look very close to their real life counterparts, where boxers dance around the ring, trying to find an opening in the opponent’s defense. Each careless swing is usually punished by a massive haymaker straight in the face. That’s the theory at least. Thanks to the very intuitive and refined controls players can dodge most attacks. This is done by holding down the L1 button in conjecture with moving the left analog stick (which is otherwise used for movement around the ring). The R1 button coupled with movements of the right analog stick on the other hand imitates using the arms to block. Holding down R1 and moving the right stick up will put both hands in front of your fighter’s face, while holding down L1 and moving the left stick down will make him dodge towards the screen (which can mean left or right, depending on the side of the screen your fighter is). Combining both methods is a lethal way to take the wind out of your opponent – moving your fighters body to the left and defending his right side with his hands will not only block anything coming from the right due to the block, but also soften the stamina hit and allow for a counter attack because of the fighter’s posture.

To perform an attack all you have to do is move the right stick in a manner that imitates the blow you would like to perform. Moving it up and right will cause your fighter to make a short jab with his right hand. Moving the stick to the left and then up in a circular motion will make him try to land an uppercut with his left arm. The further down you go when starting the move, the more your fighter will extend his arm before he swings. Haymakers fit into this as well. After moving the stick left or right, you just have to move it in the opposite direction of the swing for a short distance, than do a 180° move in the right direction. If successful, such a hit can turn the tide of battle. It does take a massive toll on the fighter’s stamina though, so haymakers should only be used when they are a guaranteed hit –right after a successful parry for example.

Combining all of this (and tons more – there is too much stuff to mention it all here) results in a very unique fighting experience. A good player actually reads the moves his opponent makes, something that won’t do you much good in regular arcade fighters. The long fights also open up limitless strategic possibilities. I’ve played against people who started out slow, taking blow after blow, rarely even trying to hit me. After a few rounds it turned out that they were all waiting for my fighter to tire, at which point they became more offensive. Needles to say, I was knocked out shortly after that.

From zero to hero

The bulk of the singleplayer experience revolves around the career mode. Here you can play as one of the legends of boxing, starting from when they were still young and unknown. The more interesting option is creating your own fighter though, and playing the career in his shoes. The amount of options is staggering and with enough time one can create a near flawless duplicate of themselves (with the mandatory six pack we all possess of course). Unfortunately the career doesn’t offer much. You just sign contract after contract, taking down the opposition one punch at a time. After gaining enough popularity in a given rank we are forced to fight the “local” champion, after which we raise one rank higher. Rinse and repeat. Before each fight you can play one of the 3 mini-games – weight lifting, bag punching and dummy punching, which all affect some of your fighter’s statistics. The career mode as a whole becomes repetitive after about 10 fights or so, but because of the increasingly higher difficulty, things stay enjoyable until the very end.

The Playstation 3 ships with a unique "Enter The Ring" first person mode. To watch the tutorial video, click the image above

Enter the ring (see tutorial video above) is a new playing mode, exclusive to the PS3. Basically it is a first person version of a regular match, including all the strategic nuances. Because of its nature this mode became a personal favorite of mine – you actually feel as if you are in the ring yourself. The audio and visual effects of stamina loss and taking hits are top notch, so I would guess this is as close as you can get to real boxing without actually entering the ring for yourself (no thanks!). Hard hits also make a return – here the rounds are not time limited and you are forced to down your opponent to win a point. The objective is to have the most points at the end of the 15 rounds.

Live schmive!

So far most of the Xbox360 to PS3 ports turned out to be inferior on Sony’s black machine. Entire essays could be written on the topic and unfortunately FNR3 suffers from some of the symptoms as well. The most glaringly obvious ones are the lack of rumble and some loss of details on some of the stages. On the other hand, the fighters look somewhat better, the motion blur is applied in a more realistic manner and most of the physics glitches with the knocked down fighters are gone. The end result is a game that, even though it is over a year old, looks amazing! The fighters could use more animation on their bodies, but when it comes to texture detail and facial animations there is no paragon. You can feel the pain when a blow connects, especially to the matrix-esque cheek wobbling that FNR3 is known for.

The commentary is well recorded; unfortunately some of the phrases are used waaaay to often. The music which can be heard in the menus is your typical light weight hip-hop, but it fits well with the overall theme of the game. The sound effects during the match don’t lack anything either, from the bone-crunching sounds to the roars of the crowd.

The most important aspect is the multiplayer though. The PS3 doesn’t have a central multiplayer system and even though EA are known for forcing their own online system, nobody dared to hope for a solid online component. Luckily we were all proven wrong. The online is very robust, with little to no lag, even when playing against opponents who live hundreds of miles away. The ESPN integration with news, sound recordings and video feeds works flawlessly as well – kudos to EA for pulling it off.

Conclusion

Sometimes you start up a game, expecting a rehashed experience. Even more so with a game from EA sports, which seldom deliver a truly fresh experience. The FNR3 experience on the PS3 is just as good as the one on the 360 and thanks to some minor nip and tuck on the controls and presentation, plus the Enter the Ring mode make, it probably is the best version of them all. It’s a year late, but who really cares when you can kick your pal’s ass halfway across the world while looking straight at his boxer’s face!

Gameplay	19/20	A game where lethal punches are just as important as reading your opponents moves and anticipating his attacks.
Graphics	19/20	At times it can be hard to tell the game apart from the real thing. At other times you might notice the low detailed crowds, but only after you’ve ogled at your fighter for 30 or so minutes first.
Sound	17/20	In typical EA fashion the game sounds great. You’ll hear some of the tracks more often than others (or was it just me?), but when the music is good, who are we to complain?
Value	18/20	Hip Hop, crunching sound effects and a repetitive commentator. A decent package that could use some more variety.
Preference	17/20	It’s not your average fighting game, so you should expect a huge change of pace. Newcomers to the genre will love it though, it’s much more newbie friendly than Tekken or Dead or Alive.
Overall	90/100	EA Sports managed to repack Fight Night Round 3 for the 360 in a brand new box, add some new features, polish a thing here and there and send it to the stores as a PS3 title. Who can blame them when the end result is so good?

What do these awards mean?