Fight Night Round 3
A pugilistic powerhouse and easily EA's strongest PS3 title yet.
Published: December 15, 2006
All this stuff is good at the start of the game when you can literally just slam the right analog stick and pummel your way to victory, but later in the game, you'll actually have to learn how to defend yourself, and it's here that the game gets exceptionally strategic and far deeper than just skimming things would make clear. Holding L1 lets you pitch you body forward and back and left and right to avoid those surprisingly effective jabs, but they also let you rock body blows on defense (useful for wearing down a really fast fighter and taking the sting out of more powerful opponents if you can sneak the shots in). Holding R1 lets you block high or low, but if you tweak the right analog stick to the left or right, you can parry attacks; the harder the hit was going to be, the bigger your window to return the hurt.
Though it sounds like a lot to juggle, it really just comes down to using a whopping three inputs if you're a purist. Sure, you can switch stances with the L2 button or pull off a quick haymarker with R2, but the latter doesn't let you control the punch, and using the face buttons is the same thing. Hell, even intentional illegal hits -- which can quickly end a game -- can be done with a thrust of the SIXAXIS. No, the strategy here is in blocking, dodging, parrying and sapping the strength of the other guys in a long-haul race for the win.
This is the depth of Round 3, and it's only made deeper by the inclusion of new blocking styles that trade damage control for speed of recovery, or going back and tweaking your style once you have things down. This is especially important online because the game is fairly good at throwing you into matchups (though record seems to play no place in actually pairing fighters up). Predicting how a person fights by eyeing their stats (and after-bout fight stats can even be sent to your e-mail if you'd like) is the key to upper-level play, and again, it just dives one level deeper into a game that 5 minutes in felt fairly shallow.
The online experience, though not especially contributive to gameplay, is helped by the integration of some extremely cool ESPN integration. Though it's buried under the online modes -- and even then takes a while to find -- you can log in and listen to pre-recorded ESPN Radio or SportsCenter segments or the godawfully downscaled ESPN Motion video clips. The list is refreshed fairly often, but the fact that you can kill the menu music and the whole eight or so longs in the soundtrack for something live is genius. I just wish accessing it were more intuitive and that ESPN Motion wasn't more or less worthless video window-wise. The PlayStation Network is already a broadband-oriented system, why not actually take advantage of it with -- I dunno -- broadband-quality (and size) clips. It's not like they're that long to begin with.
If the single-player game can be faulted anywhere, it's where the multiplayer picks up for the most part, and that's simply in how mindlessly repetitive it all is. Playing online is actually rather cool in that you gain experience as you fight and level up (which is how the game auto-matchmakes you, though you can challenge higher-ranked players for more experience). For RPG nuts, it's hopelessly addictive, but in the offline game, there game never really feels like it steps up on the default difficulty. That's not to say it can't be incredibly frustrating, but for the most part that's because it feels like the game reads you as you're pressing buttons, though that could easily have been my inexperience. Either way, it still felt like a pretty horizontal progression to all but the last couple sponsored fights.
That is how the single-player game works, by the way: sponsorships. Brands all up in your ass the whole way through. It's not a huge deal most of the time; Everlast and Under Armor and even EA Sports are cool, but Dodge and Burger King need to step the F out my pugilistic fantasies. Again, though, it's not so much the title (which sets you up against legends and gets you some of their gear and a sponsor package for playing dress-up with some skill-boosting threads later on), it's just that the single-player game is more or less the whole thing the whole way through. Yes, sure, you can hire trainers that will help quell any degradation in strength if you decide to speed train and so on, but still.