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UFC: Sudden Impact

Score: 6.0 / 10

 

- Playstation 2 Game Reviews - Fighting Game Reviews

Arcade Mode lets you choose an existing character and battle through matches trying to earn rewards and unlock hidden surprises. Champion Road is a series of 5 matches within a weight-class to earn the title. (i.e. You can’t take Gary Goodridge into the Light Heavyweight class.) Tournament Mode allows you to set up brackets of fighters and fight through single-elimination matches to the top. Versus Mode should be rather self-explanatory, so I’ll skip it. Story Mode is actually the system to 

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create a UFC competitor. After you create a body for your character, you then train them in a 3-year program where you choose which schools to take your skills from. While nice on paper, the Story Mode is pretty bad, you choose at each point whether to train your body or learn a new skill – and each training session is a mini-competition where you have to complete a specific goal against the computer AI. After a month’s training, you complete a mini-game to gauge your experience, which ends up being reduced to hitting a button at the correct time. This wouldn’t be so bad if your trainer’s advice wasn’t as useless as Doc’s between rounds of Super Punch Out. (Old-school gamers know what I’m talking about! Yeah!) Completing this mode allows you to use the character is competition… which you might not want to do depending on how seriously you take the training portion.

I won’t go into the fighting system, because there is no change over the previous game or PRIDE FC (so check out my UFC: Throwdown review if you want to read about it) except for the addition of a stun system. It is basically tying up your opponent against the fence for a few strikes. It’s a little more of an addition, but I wouldn’t say it is the Rosetta stone.

The graphics represent a step-up over the predecessor; I found that the character renders were cleaner but not too different. The sound is simplistic: a few entrance themes, a handful of grunts, and the same tempo music running during the fights.

The game balance still seems off in this incarnation – for some reason, strikers still remain seriously handicapped in this game. Anyone who has been in any martial arts competition knows that a good strike to the head can end your day in a single blow, but the system doesn’t reflect that despite some of the more dangerous strikers in this game. The advantage goes always to the grapplers and submission experts who can end the fight in a second, which I don’t think is very realistic as those kinds of squash matches don’t happen as often as this game would have you believe.

All in all, UFC: Sudden Impact is a mediocre fighting game that doesn’t provide any new ideas to the fighting genre let alone the licensed games that have already come out. Don’t pick up this title unless you are a fan of the content and you haven’t previously owned one of these games.

- Tazman

(June 9, 2004)

“The rioting is intolerable Scudworth.”

“Intolerable? Did you see the kids and the pool? They flipped that bitch right over!”

             - General and Principal Scudworth (Clone High)

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