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Preview: EA Sports UFC

I won’t lie: I’ve never really been big on fighting games. Whenever I’ve visited a friend and played a few rounds of Street Fighter or Tekken, it usually always ends up as a button-mashing contest, where the winner seems to be determined moreso on luck than actual skill. Granted, to be truly great at these games you’ve got to have skill, but having to memorise button combinations to have a fighting chance always seemed like a chore than my idea of fun.

I was therefore a little worried when I had my first match in EA’s upcoming EA Sports UFC, when things quickly turned (for me at least) into another button-mashing extravaganza. Holding down the block button and pressing a combination of the different face buttons, I managed to land a few blows to my opponent, but the bout ended in the second round with a knockout. I was dejected, slightly frustrated, but I decided to keep at it.

My opponent and I changed divisions and fighters and I gave it another crack. I studied the few pages before me with the controls and tried to see if I could employ a little more strategy in the second fight. It didn’t end well. Like the first one, I ended up losing again to a knockout (sorry Rousey, I ruined your perfect streak).

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Strangely though, I didn’t just give up and decided to try yet again. We switched to the light heavyweight division, my opponent picking Chael Sonnen and I going with Anderson Silva.  This time, I decided to avoid button-mashing and really work on a strategy. In the first round I tried to work on blocking and getting in a few punches where possible. On one occasion I even managed to land some solid kicks on Sonnen and knock him to the ground. The fight continued. Round two was much the same, but by round three things started to get interesting. In the third round, I managed to get Sonnen on the ground and work on a submission. In EA Sports UFC game, the player needs to go through a mini-game of sorts to successfully submit their opponent. The player who is potentially being submitted needs to push one of four barriers to the edge of the screen to defend and cancel the submission – this is done by moving the right stick in one of four directions. The player trying to submit his opponent however needs to mimic the direction of the defender with his right stick, then, while doing this, look for an indicator to move the left stick in another direction. As difficult as it sounds to explain it was fairly easy to pick-up, but despite this, actually managing a submission against another human player is extremely difficult. As a matter of fact, throughout the entire match, despite the large number of submission attempts from both sides, neither he nor I succeeded.

By the end of the match’s third round the toll on both our fighters was beginning to show. I had managed to deal some damage to Sonnen’s face to the point that it was cut and blood was starting to pour out, but at the same time, Silva’s face and right leg had taken significant damage as well. In the final two rounds my strategy consisted of blocking where possible, changing stances to avoid further damage to my right leg, maintaining stamina and attempting to get in as many head punches as possible for a chance of a knockout. After five intense rounds, Sonnen had won by unanimous decision… and I had lost once again.

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That said, it was an epic match and despite the loss, was thoroughly satisfying. For the first time I got a sense that a fighter could be more than a button-masher (that’s not to say I didn’t mash buttons, but at least I could see how planned shots and actions would result in a longer and more fair fight).

It needs to be said: EA Sports UFC is a seriously gorgeous game. During the presentation by the assistant producer Jazz Brousseau, the first thing that I couldn’t help but notice was how amazing the game looked. The pre-fight scenes where each fighter would walk across the stadium floor, get inspected by the medic and then enter the Octagon looked freakishly realistic, and is testament to the facial scans and 3D modelling work that the developers have put in to capture each fighter’s likeness. When it got to the actual fight themselves, things didn’t look too bad either. I noticed that there were times when limbs would seemingly go into the floor/the body of the opponent, and some of the finer details like the fighters clothing and sponsors weren’t perfect, but keep in mind this was not a final build.

The level of detail in the game as far as the fighters and their injuries go is also jaw-dropping. During the Sonnen vs. Silva fight, I noticed subtle details like Anderson’s outer thigh shaking when it was struck by his opponent. Blood that would seep from the cut on Sonnen’s face would then show on Silva’s gloves, which would then appear back on Sonnen’s skin when I’d land a punch on his body. Combined with bruising that each fighter would sustain after repeated blows to the same area (Silva’s right thigh was particularly red by the end of the fifth round), it made for an overall much more authentic and realistic fighting experience.

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As a fan of both Joe Rogan and the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, I’ve come to develop an appreciation for MMA and UFC. While I attempted to pursue this interest further with the UFC 3, the game’s ridiculous load times made playing it essentially unbearable. With EA Sports UFC though, things seem very different. Load times didn’t appear to be an issue, and just from the select few fights we did, the game showed some great promise both in terms of gameplay and also in the level of detail – from the likeness of the fighters themselves, to the various techniques you can employ while fighting, to the effect of damage on the fighters bodies as the bout progresses. I mentioned before that I’ve never really been big on fighting titles, but this is certainly one I’m going to keep an eye out for.

EA Sports UFC launches on 17 June for Xbox One and PS4.


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About the author

Nicholas Simonovski

Events and Racing Editor at Stevivor.com. Proud RX8 owner, Strange Music fan and Joe Rogan follower. Living life one cheat meal at a time.