Format: ps3/360 (ps3 version tested)

ETA: Out Now

Publisher: EA

Developer: EA Sports

Players: 2

Web: www.FightNight.com

A new Fight Night has arrived and to be honest it looks a lot more closer to that 2005 FNR 3 render then the actually FNR3 did. So obviously it delivers some haymakers but is it followed by the KO?

The game brings the same game options as FNR3, a quick Fight Now, Create a Fighter, Legacy Mode, Online and Practise. There’s pretty much nothing new here accept obviously the graphics upgrade and modified gameplay, but first I’ll quickly mention the game options.

Fight Now is essentially the pick up and play option, you can quickly pick a weight class, your fighter and what difficulty you want to fight at, it’s easy to get straight into a fight and before you know it you’ll be having fun.

Create a Fighter is again the same, you can chose from a range of heads or download some faces but you can also, if you have Vision or PS eye camera you can take a quick grab of your face and upload it onto a fighter’s body. After which you can further customise it, like making the head wider, tone of the body and that as well as the cloths they were and their style. On the both versions you can also customise the music entrance, however for some reason EA only allow the 360 version to use music from the HDD. We have no idea why this was left out of the PS3 version.

Legacy makes a return and is exactly the same as the previous versions, if you’ve played any other game, say the Smackdown! Series GM Mode acts the same way here, allowing you to have a number of training sessions before a fight, which vary from a dodging med ball, sparing and throwing come combo punches to the punch bag. The Legacy’s calendar option allows scheduling your fights, although you may be challenged at any time.

Now finally the good stuff, Gameplay;

Unlike 2007’s Fight Night Round 3, FNR 4 is a faster paced version, sure the graphics for everything has greatly improved, even the crowd look a lot better, more so though the control scheme has changed to the Analogue sticks, sure FNR3 had this as an optional scheme but FNR4 has them as standard, with the option of changing this, and they work amazingly well, however because of the quick response you can easily spam jab until you wear the opponent down. The controls often recognise what you wanting to do but can get confused sometimes specially with most move sets being only a few degrees away from one another.

Another feature that returns is the counter punch, although parry seems to be missing from this one, but I’ll get back to this after first explaining a major change to gameplay, which is down to the physics.

You see most fighting games, such as the previous Fight Night and the fore mentioned Smackdown series, which are often wired to you pushing a button, if you press it at the right time no matter what it’ll hit due to the coding and what not but with this if you push a button all it does is make your fighter punch so with this you can cause glancing blows. Again however back to the punching system because of this it doesn’t feel like you are really hitting your opponent unless you get a counter punch and then you know you got them good. This also makes the game a bit more unpredictable as one well placed punch can put you down… I mean your opponent.

Overall the game is great fun, online is fine but can be laggy at times and depending on whom you’re playing against. The game is a massive improvement over its predecessor and I hope EA take their time with Fight Night Round 5.

8/10