Despite the rapidly growing appeal of the Ultimate Fighting Championship franchise in recent years (largely thanks to its increased exposure through pay-per-view and the success of The Ultimate Fighter reality show on Spike TV), it has been over five years since a UFC game has been released on consoles. At long last, publisher THQ and developer Yukes Media Creations have stepped into the Octagon with their first offering, facing off against an immense amount of pressure and high expectations from fans, and a poor video game legacy that was mismanaged by the creators of the previous UFC: Tapout games. Does UFC 2009: Undisputed deliver the best representation of mixed martial arts to date, or is it just another overhaul with more flash than substance?
Gameplay:
UFC 2009: Undisputed offers five modes of play: Exhibition, Career, Tutorial, Classic Fights and Online (Xbox Live). Exhibition and Online are likely where most casual players will spend most of their time offline, as these are the only modes where players can choose whichever fighter they want, including custom fighters that they have created themselves in the Create-A-Fighter Mode. Undisputed features over 80 real-life fighters spanning across five weight classes, so there is no shortage of variety of fighters (or opponents) to choose from. Tutorial is the free-practice mode where you can spar with your chosen fighter until your heart's content or learn and review basic techniques via the Guide. Even if you think you know what you are doing, I strongly recommend that all players complete the Guide at least once in order to familiarize themselves not only with the game's key techniques, but also the new and improved (yet highly complex) controls.
Borrowing a page from the popular Playstation fighting series Tekken, the face buttons A, B, X, and Y represent the left punch, right punch, left kick and right kick, respectively, while the Left Analog stick moves your fighter. Holding LB while attacking will aim your punches and kicks towards your opponent's head, while LT will focus your strikes towards his body or legs. RB and RT block high and low, respectively, and the Right Analog stick is used for entering clinches, executing throws or shooting for takedowns when used in combination with LB or LT, and for performing transitions, reversals, submissions and escapes in the ground game. Most casual players and beginners will spend most of their time trading blows in the standing game and will have a good time, as fight-finishing flash knockouts can occur at any time (even in the first round), but hardcore UFC fans and fighting game fans will get bored with this quickly and will want to move on to the ground game, where more complex and rewarding outcomes await.
Unfortunately, the ground game is also where players will need to bring along their patience, as a number of problems prevent it from being as good as it should be. Using a control scheme called "Ultimate Fight Control", both offensive and defensive players can perform minor and major transitions by executing quarter-circle and just-over-quarter circle motions on the right analog stick in order to gain an advantage over one another. Such transitions can result in an escape, a shift from a less advantageous position to a more advantageous position, or the complete the reversal of an opponent's grapple or attack. The problem is that there are no visual or tactile indicators (like a tug-of war meter or controller vibration) to indicate when a transition is being successfully performed. It either works or it doesn't, and while the motions should be intuitive, sometimes you'll find yourself attempting to move or shift in one direction only to find yourself going the opposite way, missing a crucial opportunity for a mount up (from where your fighter can most effectively deliver his punches). Submissions, the weapon of choice for wrestlers, judokas and Brazilian Ju-Jitsu fighters are also highly unreliable in single-player. While they are fairly straight forward and easy to pull off in the Guide and Tutorial modes, submissions are nearly impossible to pull off on the computer A.I. in the Exhibition and Career modes, (i.e. when it really counts), even when your opponent has only a sliver of stamina left. Because of this, building up a fighter offline who specializes in submission techniques in can be an exercise in frustration.
In keeping with the "Real as it Gets" mantra of the UFC, stamina indicators are turned off. I highly recommend that beginners turn them on so that they have a better indication of their own fighters' stamina as well as their opponent's. While this won't necessarily guarantee a successful submission, it's better than going into an attempt completely blind.
Graphics:
Aside from the game's deep yet sometimes vexing game mechanics, Undisputed's visuals are solid evidence that THQ is ready to take the UFC franchise into the next generation, as the attention to graphical details outshine the previous Tapout games in every way. The character models of each fighter animate smoothly and move swiftly about the Octogon when in battle. Bodies become increasingly soaked with sweat during a round, and blood spatters and flows freely from freshly opened cuts as the fight rages on and leaves permanent stains on the canvas. Fighters' chests heave realistically, their nostrils flare as they inhale and exhale, and their faces scowl and grimace as they deliver a strong blow or take a powerful hit. Speaking of hits, Undisputed sports some of the best collision-detection in a sports game that I have seen in a game yet. There is absolutely no clipping between fighter models, which means that when two fighters are in a clinch or a grapple, no part of a fighter's body passes unrealistically through that of the other fighter, so it becomes much easier to tell what is going on in a clinch or when the battle goes to the ground. Even the standing game is affected, as punches and kicks can now glance or skip off the body of an evading fighter or a successful block. Attacks can also be nullified by a counter strike, or can even be answered by an attack of similar strength even though the original blow successfully landed at full force. In other words, the result of an attack is no longer binary, success or fail, on or off. In a typical match, you can expect to see punches slip through blocks while they are still forming. You'll see fighters that are shooting low for a takedown absorb a painful sidekick to the ribs, but often they'll still manage to bring down their opponent with their forward momentum. And you'll definitely see a fighter take a punch to the face at the same time that he is planting a kick in his assailant's bread basket or delivering a right hook to the bridge of his nose. Just like in real fight, you can never be 100 percent sure how your punch or kick will land on your opponent even if it connects, so successful fighters will learn to temper their assaults with caution unless they want to get "rocked" hard and often.
Just like in EA's Fight Night Round 3, fighters can be temporarily "rocked" by powerful blow to the head, accentuated by a brief, slow-motion close-up of the fighter's face as the impact causes a shockwave to ripple across his face, often temporarily deforming his lips, jaw or cheeks in a painful and almost comedic fashion. While this dangerous situation can take place at just about any time during a match, it usually occurs as the result of an accumulation of undefended strikes to the head or face, and signals that a knockout, while not inevitable, is only a few punches away. In a very nice accompanying visual effect, all the colours on screen immediately change to black and white when the fighter gets rocked, and then slowly start to bleed back in, first as sepia tones and then finally returning to full colour as the fighter recovers.
While there is nothing visually sub-par in Undisputed, the game falls short in its overall presentation. For example, while the fighting runs at a silky-smooth 60fps, practically every sequence involving your fighter outside the fight, including the introductions in the Octagon, victory celebrations and even the opening and closing sequences in the Career training mode seem to run at only 30ps, which simply should not be happening in a game like this.
Another visual element that is sorely missing from Undisputed that has been present in THQ's WWE/Wrestlemania games for years is the pure grandeur and bombastic nature of the sport in general. For example, even the original Ultimate Fighting Championship game for the Sega Dreamcast featured entrances for the fighters. Sure, it was basically one entrance that was repeated for each participant and the animations of the fighters were extremely robotic and stiff compared to what games these days are capable of, but the point is that the entrances were there. Anyone who has attended a live UFC, boxing or wrestling event knows that the individual entrances of the fighters create a moment where all the excitement and anticipation surrounding the inevitable clash between the two adversaries builds to a fever pitch, and that excitement continues right up until the fighters are unleashed upon each other. In Undisputed, all fights begin in the Octogon, and while players are always treated to an eloquent introduction by Bruce Buffer as each fighter warms up for the battle ahead, the heavily canned and reused animation sequences for the fighters come off as just matter-of-fact and fail to give each fighter his own distinct personality. Other elements, such as the fairly flat and unexcited crowds visible outside the Octogon to the cookie-cutter venues also seem to underline the many missed opportunities that THQ and Yukes had to inject the game with the kind of excitement one would experience at a live UFC event.
Audio:
The sound in Undisputed fares much better. The licensed soundtrack is excellent, totally capturing the take-no-prisoners attitude of the sport with a healthy mixture of metal, rap and rock, and the sound effects of connecting punches, kicks, and bodies being slammed to the canvas seem spot-on, without any hint of artificiality. The colour commentary by Joe Rogan and Mike Goldberg is also right on target, not only providing accurate reports of what is occurring on screen but also providing some history on some of the upper-tier fighters that you will face (and perhaps even some hints as to what techniques you should avoid using against them). In certain menus as well as during downtime in career mode, you'll also be treated to very entertaining sound bites taken from the climaxes of famous UFC matches and pre/post fight commentaries, such as announcers Rogan and Goldberg's live reaction to veteran MMA fighter Chuck Liddell's shocking loss by KO to Rashad Evans at UFC 88. Clearly, the developers at THQ wanted to impress upon newcomers the history as well as the spectacular matchups of UFC events past, and these audio snippets certainly do the job.
On the downside, the background music for career and training mode, while more than serviceable, is heavily synthesized and repetitive, and is even more tedious in modes where the aforementioned sound bites aren't overlaid to provide some variety. Inexplicably, fights in the Octogon as well as in the gym open up with several seconds of silence before actual sound of the crowds and/or announcers join in. Finally, as with THQ's WWE/Wrestlemania titles, the fighters do not speak or utter any real sounds, aside from the occasional grunt as they execute a transition reversal. This isn't really anything new, and it seems somewhat unreasonable for anyone to expect THQ to collect voice samples from over 80 UFC fighters, but it would have been nice if the fighters were a little more vocal, at least when delivering or taking a blow.
Longevity:
UFC 2009: Undisputed offers a solid amount of play time regardless whether you play it alone or with friends, but as I mentioned earlier, the most fun most players will take place when they are duking it out offline with their friends or online over Xbox Live. With the large selection of fighters as well as the highly customizable Create-A-Fighter mode, there are enough gameplay and "OMG" moments here to satisfy casual gamers for weeks. For solo gamers, Career mode can potentially extend those weeks into months as they create their own roster of original fighters in different disciplines and build each one of them up from nobodies into UFC Hall of Famers. Finally, the smartly conceived Classic Fights mode allows you to recreate 12 historical UFC matchups as well as unlock actual video clips from those events by meeting certain conditions. Each fight is prefaced by an FMV introduction of what was at stake for each fighter who partook in the match as well as video clips that were taken from interviews with both fighters during the build up to the actual fight. This mode is very cool because in addition to letting you participate in a moment of UFC history, the opening and reward video clips put a human face behind each featured fighter and provide just a little of the personality and grandeur of the UFC that the game itself does not deliver. Depending on how quickly you are able to meet the Classic Fights conditions (remember, all it takes is one unwanted flash knockout to send you back to square one), completing all 12 fights can easily tack on at least another six or more hours.
Overall:
If you are one of the many hardcore UFC fans that have been waiting for a videogame worthy of the franchise (and if you are reading this you are probably one of the three who didn't run out and buy it on day one), stop reading and go and pick this game up. Make no mistake, UFC 2009: Undisputed IS the best UFC game to date, and while it is far from perfect, at the very least THQ and Yukes have created a solid base on which build a successful and long-running franchise. In the meantime, Undisputed offers plenty of deep gameplay, value and excitement for the gaming dollars of die-hard fans and casual gamers alike, and might just be the gateway drug that will bring more fans to the UFC, and in turn, the demand for even more impressive and electrifying UFC games.
