Sports games are the purest form of video games. Ever since Pong they have been pitting us one-on-one against out friends in a battle for supremacy, and as I’m one of those fuddy-duddy’s who prefers local multiplayer to online multiplayer, sports games have become my genre of choice.
But sports games are not just for playing with friends anymore. They now come packed with different game modes which offer multiple ways for the player to experience the sport, ranging from career modes, to challenge modes, to leagues, tournaments and the like. EA Sports games in particular regularly come jam-packed with features, offering extensive fan service that ensures players are kept busy until the next iteration in their multitude of sports series releases. EA Sports UFC is an odd duck, then, as it offers nothing of the sort.
EA Sports UFC is the most barebones sports game I have played in quite some time. It’s a decent enough fighting game – even though it lacks the thrilling spontaneity of THQ’s now-defunct UFC Undisputed series – but the extra-curricular activities it provides players with outside of brawling seem positively dated when you consider that it exists alongside NBA 2K14, a game which sees your player-character fight his way through the NBA draft, form bonds with his teammates and management, attend press conferences to garner fan support, work his way to his team’s starting line-up before fighting to get them to the top of the conference. It’s hardly an epic showcase in storytelling, but it provides plenty of reasons to continue playing, and lets you form a level of attachment to the b-baller you’re controlling.
On the other hand, EA Sports UFC offers nothing of the sort. You’re asked to create a fighter with very few customization options, before being thrust into an endless repetitive wave of short fights and training rounds. Training segments have never been the highlight of sports games, but they’re required to let the player get to grips with the game. However, in EA Sports UFC, the majority of these segments serve not as tutorials, but as padding. I lost count of the amount of times I was asked to perform basic kicks and punches for my coach, tapping those circle and triangle buttons until I eventually felt as though I was having an out-of-body experience, with a complete lack of control over my own actions while the game insisted upon me performing mundane tasks in order to acquire points in order to level up my fighter.
It’s quite shocking when you consider that EA Sports UFC was developed by EA Canada, the team responsible for Fight Night Champion, which in my humble opinion featured the greatest single-player mode of any sports game yet. Fight Night Champion placed you in the shoes of Andre Bishop in a Rocky-esque rags-to-riches tale featuring hateful villains, brotherly betrayal and even a stint in jail, in which Bishop becomes a bearded and world-weary fighter a la Rocky Balboa. I’ve been praying for a Fight Night Champion 2 for years now, and that EA Canada’s next jab at a fighting game is so hopelessly lacking in content when compared with its boxing brethren is disheartening.
EA Sports UFC will likely be praised as a “good start” to the series due to its relatively solid fighting mechanics and gorgeous visual presentation, but THQ had already nailed the tenacity, complexity and ruthlessness of MMA in UFC Undisputed 3. There’s so much EA could have done with the career mode here, given the content provided by The Ultimate Fighter reality TV show and the larger than life personalities of the UFC’s fighters, but all we got was a few awkward video sequences with Dana White and a punching bag.
EA Sports’ games get a bad rep for being “the same every year,” though those who play them know better. While there may not be too much visual differentiation between each yearly release, those who buy each annual release of the FIFA series will know that FIFA 14‘s gameplay differs greatly from that of FIFA 13‘s, and the same can be said for many sports game releases. It’s still the same sport, so the wheel doesn’t exactly find itself being reinvented every year, but it’s the subtle changes that have a huge impact on the overall feel of each game. What EA’s done with UFC, though, is take the basic mechanics of UFC Undisputed, made it prettier, stripped away most of its content and then released it. Either EA Canada should go back to the drawing board and think of something interesting to do with this franchise other than making UFC Undisputed 0.5, or they should hurry up and make Fight Night Champion 2 already.
