The Ultimate Fighting Championship is as brutal as fighting competitions get. To get an idea of just how nasty this multiple martial arts contest is, imagine two men brutally beating each other to a bloody pulp with virtually no defence or twisting a competitor’s arm until it was about to snap, or in some cases does snap; “A human cockfight” is how it was once described. However, none of these visceral combat elements seen in the UFC are replicated with the same-eye-covering brutality in UFC Undisputed 3. In fact, instead of two men fighting desperately for a K.O. it looks somewhere between a playground scrap and a homosexual romp. The potential for a great fighting game is here, but it simply can’t get near the speed and sheer violence of the real spectacle.
A shame, but it is not that this game is without sophistication. The controls are intelligently put together to get across the primary elements of UFC: grappling, striking and clinching. Unfortunately, despite the controls being able to accurately replicate the fighting styles found in MMA, they are simply too complicated to fully immerse you into a fight. Fighting a man three times your size, it is particularly stressful figuring out the slightly different joystick movement between a major transition and a transition block, or even between a strike and a feint. This leads to frantic button bashes replicating fighting styles that are famously intricate despite their inelegance.
Surprisingly, the game’s strength is in fact in its various game modes. The management simulator in the career mode is superb. Building up a fighter from humdrum backgrounds into the UFC is compelling and fun. This, alongside the fun training games and various training camps to learn combat abilities, gives a spark to the career mode. This is slightly worrying when the management can be more fun than actual combat.
This is not to say that Undisputed 3 is a bad fighting game. Once you get over the fact that it isn’t quite an accurate representation of MMA and the complicated controls, the combat flows and works wonderfully. The service that it gives to UFC fans is impressive to say the least. The character roster includes pretty much every UFC fighter ever to have gained even brief popularity, the locations are diverse – not that you notice when people are beating the hell out of each other in The Octagon – and the in-game movies, although useless to someone who doesn’t know UFC, give a brilliant insight into the background and fighters of the UFC.
Undisputed 3, despite an overly complex combat system, is a focused, deep and adrenaline-fueled fight fest that any combat sports fan would be mad to miss and is, after a bit of effort, worth a try for someone who has never touched anything like this before. I suppose the real shame is that it doesn’t come anywhere close to the sheer spectacle of the real event.
