Mixed Martial Arts is a competitive sport that has rocketed in popularity over the last few years, thanks in no small part to the growing presence of the Ultimate Fighting Championship league. THQ must have known it had a hit on its hands with its first annual UFC sim game last year, but even the publisher was surprised at the phenomenal success of Undisputed 2009. The challenge now, however, is to improve upon that debut and still maintain that level of success.
Shortly after sitting down to play the game, I immediately noticed that the level of presentation has been amped considerably. The graphics have been tarted up – not that
UFC Undisputed 2009 was shabby or anything – and the camerawork tweaked so that you get to truly revel in each brutal punch, kick and submission. A lot of attention to detail has been made to ensure that the in-game
UFC replicates the real-life one – even down to the buxom ladies holding round cards.
While a lot of attention has been spent in cleaning up the visuals, there's also been a drive to make the character customisation feature a lot more robust. Producer Neven Dravinski pointed out that
UFC 2009 was quite limited in how players could build their ultimate fighter – there weren't an awful lot of colour options and images such as tattoos were limited to rigid placement areas.
In
2010, the developers have tried to make the feature so tight, that you could create any of the real-life UFC brawlers based on these options alone. Every time I get to play around with a character customisation mode I can't help but try to make the most bizarre, crazy person that ever lived. I've played games where you could turn the skin colour of wrestling fighters green! What joys could
UFC 2010 offer?
Well, being a bit more of a serious game, there's nothing that will allow you to go to mental with the tools available. I was impressed with the amount of options though – from hairstyles to individual lip sizes, to even the angle and curvature of eyelids. Needless to say, somehow I used all of these to my advantage to create a weighty, hairy beast of a man that sports a squished head, battle-bruised ears and whose face resembled something of a gorilla. I called him Adolfo Kang.
Fighter customisation also gives you the ability to tailor your own list of moves. As you play through the Career mode and experience Training with your own unique Adolfo Kang, you can earn points which can be used to improve various levels of ability. Setting an age for your character is important as well, because that will depend on how well he can recover from attacks.
The Career mode in particular seems to be your usual 'reach the top of the league' business, with an added twist – you begin in the lower-class World Fighters Alliance and work your way up the chain, earning sponsors as you go, until UFC president Dana White headhunts and invites you to the big league. However, each game will be as important as the last, and you can lose sponsors and face relegation just as quickly as you achieve success if you suffer from a bad game.
No doubt Career will be an involved feature, but for now the only playable modes I could experience was in Exhibition and Tournament. The former is the quickplay option that allows you to just grab a couple of pads and duke it out without any frills, while the latter offers a 16-player fight for the title in several rounds of one-on-one matches.
