Boxing games and the sport itself were once a big part of my life. Fight Night Round 3, Round 4, and Champion, and even Ready to Rumble Boxing were games that I spent hours playing. I even joined a local boxing gym for a time too, training every week and managed to win a trophy. However, much as it has in my personal life, boxing has all but disappeared in the gaming scene, with boxers being special characters in other fighting games instead. Stepping into this empty ring is Steel City Interactive, whose mission is to bring boxing games back with Undisputed.
Undisputed has a number of different modes including career, quick fights, and prize fights. There is also online which has quick fights and ranked fights, though the single player was the main focus for this review as I was not able to find any matches online before launch.
What’s most important throughout is that Undisputed’s gameplay has a lot of depth to it and that it captures the fundamentals of what boxing is. This is not a sport where you just keeping throwing punches hoping for the best and Undisputed teaches you the need to strategise, work to your strengths, expose your opponent’s weaknesses, have patience, and keep your guard up because a single punch can turn the tide. Every fighter has a lot of attributes and fighting styles, such as Slugger and Swarmers. There’s attributes for every aspect of a boxer including the power of jabs, hooks, uppercuts, straights, and power punches. Then you have stats for movement speed, stamina, endurance, block strength, head health, body health, and a whole lot more. Every single one of these measurements is noticeable in each boxer, with lower rated boxers feeling sluggish compared to higher rated boxers.
This will be most obvious when you start career mode, where you can choose to create your own fighter or pick a fighter from the roster. The roster itself features a number of big name boxers from across the ages, along with other real life boxers. There are some notable absences, but it is still an impressive lineup. Whatever you decide you will start low rated and at the bottom of the ranks of the various divisions with a poor rating, and your job is to climb up those ladders to eventually win the six belts available.
Outside of fights, career mode is about navigating different menus which includes managing your team, your fight negotiations, and training. The first thing is putting your team together which includes your coach, cutman, and manager. All three are rated from E to A, and you will start with E rated teams. The coach influences your training, granting bonuses for training and traits. Traits are coach specific and are essentially attribute bonuses, with more traits unlocking the longer you stick with a coach. You can also update your coach’s ratings using coach XP or skip that and hire better coaches as your progress. The cutman is responsible for your health in and out of the ring, dealing with injuries that may be sustained during fight camps and dealing with cuts and swelling between rounds in a bout. The manager is responsible for setting up your fights, negotiating the percentage of money you’ll take home, the amount of weeks training allowed before a fight, and how many media things to do.
All of this will affect your income, ranking, fame. The higher each of these goes the bigger fights you can get, and the better the gyms you can train at. If you do not like the fights your manager has offered, you can manually go check the rankings and see who else is available to fight and negotiate your own contracts. You may not always be successful negotiating the fight contracts though, and that fight will then not be negotiable again for a time.
Once everything is in place it is time to make your way to the ring, and start trading punches. You can use either the face buttons or right analog stick to throw different punches, with the basics being jab, straight, hooks, cross, and uppercuts. You will also need to keep an eye on your stamina, which depletes as you throw punches, and take shots to the body, along with your health. As punches land, your head and body health will deteriorate, and once it reaches a critical point the boxer will get rocked. At this point, an opponent can deal extra health damage which will cause a fighter to go down. Land a significant punch and you may even knock down an opponent without having to throw additional punches, though this is hard to do.
If you do get knocked down, there is a minigame where you have to move indicators for the left and right analog sticks into bars and keep then within the range to get up. To be honest, I hated this minigame as it is not that intuitive or fun. Thankfully, you can turn it off in the settings. If you do this your fighter will get up automatically, though how quickly depends on their stats. What Undisputed does lack is proper flash knockouts. Even if you knock down an opponent you will have to wait for a count, and the same animation will play for every one of those. Having a proper KO, like in other boxing games, where it is obvious that the fighter is not getting up would add some extra drama to proceedings.
Fights can also be stopped if a cut or swelling gets too much, which is like real life, though it is amusing to hear the ref ask a fighter if they are okay with blood running down their face and their eye basically shut, but being allowed to continue. If a fighter becomes too injured to continue, they also have the same animation of disbelief played out too.
One big disappointment comes with the sub-par commentary. The same lines are repeated over and over again, and sometimes it does not make sense or match up to what is happening.
Generally the boxing is fine, though all boxers seem to be a bit sluggish despite their speed rating, and sometimes punches will be thrown in what appears to be the direction of your opponent, and yet miss. There can be a noticeable delay between inputs and what is happening on screen, which can be frustrating as you try to pull off a combo, only to be thrown off by the timing. There has also been issues of slowdown and stuttering in some fights, which needs to be addressed as early as possible. It is not always like this and when things run smoothly Undisputed is really fun.
It is best to follow the game’s advice and start on Intermediate difficulty, and you will discover why especially when trying out the prize fight mode. These are three fights, which will change weekly, that are set at the three difficulty modes in the Undisputed; Intermediate, Pro, and Undisputed. Intermediate will be tough enough when you first start. Pro is very tough as the AI is much more intelligent when guarding and putting together combos. On Undisputed difficulty you cannot see any of your opponent’s health and stamina bars, meaning you have to rely on visual cues to figure out the best approach.