June 9th, 2009 | 
Author: I am shocked. When I tried the UFC 09 demo, I went in with relatively low expectations to what I thought was going to be a mediocre experience with shallow gameplay. I was proven wrong, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. The fighting was deeper than anyone could have expected it to be, it looked almost real, and it was generally brilliant. So I’m shocked that the rest of the game managed to keep the quality going.
It really does. The game runs smoothly, with only an occassional freeze-up for a fraction of a second before it continues. It’s not even close to enough to ruin the experience, in fact, it’s closer to a niggle than a problem. The fighters look as close to real I’ve seen before and the detail in them is astounding. Glistening sweat trickles down their bodies, blood splashes on their chest (and glistens), huge cuts open on their face, eyes and lips swell up – it’s all sickeningly impressive. The blood that splashes does look a little square-y once it lands on the mat, but that’s a small problem, too.
Fighting isn’t the easiest thing to get to grips with. The punching and kicking is easy enough, square and triangle are left and right punches, X and circle are left and right kicks, and on their own they’ll be mid-attacks, hold L1 they’ll go higher and L2 will aim lower. Easy enough to get used to, but when you get to grapples it’s harder – it’s all done with the right analogue stick. When stood, pressing forward when close enough to the opposition will move into a clinch, which is like a manly, sweaty hug, and further manipulation of the right analogue gets them onto the mat, where quarter- and third-rotations are used to transition between positions.
It’s all rather hard to explain in text, so the lengthy tutorial that you can get to from the main menu is a welcome addition, though it does seem to take a long time, it’s worth it, because you won’t get too far if you don’t know what to do when you’re on the ground.
The career mode is pretty good. You start off creating a character (or selecting a preset). The create-a-fighter is quite in-depth, enabling you to shape his face extensively, change his hair, add tattoos to pretty much any part of his body, the usual stuff. It’s built on organising the weeks between your matches by choosing from four things; training to increase strength/speed/cardio, sparring to earn skill points or resting. You can also do public exposure events such as signing autographs to increase credibility (and therefore get better fights and sponsors) and invite other fighters to your gym to level up your fighting schools (kickboxing, wrestling, etc).
You choose one of a few fights in advance, then train for them, then fight them. It’s not a revolutionary system but it does work. Whilst I was playing I got up to 8 fights straight away without a loss and hit a huge difficulty spike against Forrest Griffin, who demolished me, despite any attempts. I suffered a few losses until I was back in the game and climbed my way up to a title match again Rampage Jackson, which I won. When you win the belt, you must then defend the belt in fights, and you eventually get put into the Hall of Fame. Getting there is quite a good feeling, too, as fights can be difficult and managing to beat your way into the Hall of Fame and knowing you’ve survived them all is quite fulfilling.
There’s also a Classic Fights mode that allows you to recreate famous fights from the history of the UFC. You get an introduction from a very pretty American lady who tells you about the fight, then an actual video introduction as if you were about to actually fight the fight yourself. But with a controller. It’s a good idea and you can even unlock extras through doing it.
I did get a couple of multiplayer games in, one of which I won, two of which I lost against people whose ranks were far, far above mine, but with the game not being released yet I can’t really pass judgement properly. From what I played, it seemed lag-free, and it has a leveling system. You also earn medals and, if you earn enough medals, trophies, too. It looks like it works well, but we’ll post a multiplayer impressions next week once we’ve had chance to play it properly.
Overall, UFC09 is a hugely impressive package. It looks great, it has a deceptively deep fighting system that is true to the real thing, if a little too clean cut to look exactly real, and it’s hugely entertaining. There is a mandatory install of 1.371gb that only too 2 minutes 55 seconds, and neither the size nor the time taken is large at all. Playing local multiplayer with a friend is brilliant fun, resulting in shouts of ‘oooooh!’ as you punch him and his fighter of choice proceeds to land on his face in a wince-inducing state of forced unconsciousness. Then you can watch the replay, including a slow-motion close-up of the punch in question. Brilliant.
9/10
Article Source: UFC Undisputed 09 Review
