Call me predictable, but there is no way I can write this review without mentioning Fight Night Round 3. Fight Night 3 you see, is the ultimate in boxing games. There’s never been a better representation of video game boxing than that of Fight Night 3. All of a sudden, though - the world heavyweight boxing game champion has a new challenger, a young upstart from 2kgames and it’s coming with the man that made Mike Tyson a star - Don King, the self confessed greatest promoter in the world.

Immediately leaping into Prizefighter’s career mode, I am presented with the create a boxer screen. Now, I’m personally a poor man to judge, because I pretty much loathe (whatever the game) having to create a character. I’d rather just get down to some playing. Anyway, I did have a tinker with the CAB, and it does offer a reasonable amount of options, although its interface leaves a lot to be desired. The next stop on the career path is the revelation of how it’s all put together. You’ve already done your career so what you are playing is in fact a ’part’ in a documentary. This is an inspired idea and is genuinely very interesting. The documentary is live action, and is played out by some real boxers and actors assuming the role of other boxer, agents and promoters, Don King also adds in his two cents. During your career you’ll watch the entire documentary to its climax. Occasionally you’ll also get CGI cut scenes to further the current story concerning (usually) your next opponent. I can’t really fault the set up of the documentary. Everyone plays a fine role, and it is leaps and bounds ahead of most other live action scenes, that to be fair, you rarely see in video games. 

Just when you think Prizefighter has Fight Night 3 on the ropes, Fight Night makes a dramatic comeback and throws a brutal left hook sub-titled ’controls’ at Don King’s new baby. BANG! Prizefighter goes down hard. Not to give you the wrong impression, The Prizefighter controls aren’t dreadful, but they are decidedly prehistoric when compared to Fight Night. As Prizefighter was developed by the team behind Rocky Legends, you won’t be surprised to find out it controls some what like Rocky Legends, only a little more complex. For anyone used to the analogue controls of Fight Night, the controls here will feel very awkward indeed. Though blocking is very similar, punches are made using the face buttons, with the right trigger also coming into play when you want to body shot. It starts getting a little more involved when you incorporate the step around punches. Holding the right bumper button and pushing either up or down on the left analogue stick will make you boxer step around to the side of your opponent. There is also a step in punch which is performed by holding the right bumper and any face button. These are more powerful punches that give you a much longer reach, and if you can master them, they’re probably the safest method of attack. You also have several signature punches, which result in devastation if they connect, they can immediately turn a fight around, and sometimes even cause a knock down. The control system is very tough to get to grips with, you will not get through the career mode by just button bashing, you will be taken to school. They are also, not 100% accurate, which is a pretty big hindrance. The movement of your boxer feels clunky and unresponsive, which again, is a pretty major flaw…..what was I saying about the controls not being dreadful? Geez, I certainly wouldn’t have scored Prizefighter lower if it had completely ripped of Fight Night’s controls quite the opposite in fact.

Count of 8 and Prizefighter makes it to its feet, Fight Night can’t believe it, but is ready and waiting to go in for the kill. But what’s this!? Out of nowhere, Prizefighter sends Fight Night to the ground with a lucky punch. The training ‘mini games’ in Prizefighter are excellent and highly addictive. The reason for this is the kooky way in which many of them are designed. Rhythm action is was it’s called, and it’s a simple concept which requires you to press a button as it travels through a line. Skipping and the speed bag utilise this system. The skipping is manageable, but the speed bag will require a lot of (pun intended) training. The more straight forward heavy bag, simply requires you to punch a moving highlighted circle. The sparring mitts require you to press the desired button before it stops flashing. All the training tasks are very simple, but what sets them apart the most is the fact that after every session, a leader board will pop up, showing you how well you score against other people on Xbox LIVE. Every training session you enter, stops being about earning stats for your career boxer, and becomes a high score attempt to move you further up the leader board. This is a great idea, and really makes the training interesting. You do have an auto train feature, but then that’s not going to get you above ‘Halo4Life’ on the leaderboards.

So, Prizefighter is gallantly putting up a fine challenge, but as if to say “I’ve just been toying with you this whole time, boy!” Fight Night knocks Prizefighter out. It’s over, ended, finished! Perhaps, not a completely fair comparison, with Fight Night’s superb, jaw droopingly amazing visuals still ranking in the top 5 best looking games ever list, thing is, Prizefighter doesn’t even attempt to amaze you with it’s graphics. The actual boxers do look pretty good, so do the venues that you box in. The real flaw of Prizefighter comes from the collision detection, it is horrible. After making a knockdown, you want to revel in the glory and watch the replay in reverence of the punch you have just landed. Here, the replays show you what really went down, your right hook landing squarely 6 inches away from your opponent, they sell it like they’ve been shot and fall to the mat , literally like a ton of bricks. WHAT!? Where’s the crushing close up of my glove indentation on my opponents face? Where’s the blood spraying out of his busted nose? Awww MAN! This just isn’t right! There’s no satisfaction in a knock down. Other graphical mishaps also include opponents ignoring your block and going straight through your gloves and connecting with an un-vicious looking punch. Sure, sweat flies off the characters when they have been supposable hit, but that’s not enough. I’m not expecting something in the visual scale of Fight Night 3, at least until Fight Night 4, but this is just horribly frustrating in how it waters down the entire experience and it doesn’t even try to compete with Fight Night 2. Sure, shiny, sweaty boxers are all great, but the effort is wasted when punches that cause damage clearly don’t actually touch your opponent.

Crushing blows don’t often sound that crushing, whilst the ring announcer is a blatant rip of Michael Buffer. Once you’ve advanced enough to not be fighting in local garden sheds, you’ll have commentators. The commentary is hit and miss, at some points it accurately describes the on screen action, other times it doesn’t. Sometimes, it sounds literally like a broken record…record….record….record - see, it’s even got me doing it. They don’t get nearly hyped up enough for a knock down, either. The entrance music is good, though. Featuring a wide array of styles to fit most tastes, some in house and some licensed tracks. The corner men and trainers suffer from a limited vocabulary. They probably have about 20 different sentences which do get tiresome.  

Online multiplayer is buggy as hell, with the less honest of people often exploiting these bugs. It is very disheartening when you lose, but when you’ve lost due to some idiot just plain cheating, you just want to give up. Scoring is purely based on punches landed. So, if you’re very technical, and are landing at great variety of blows, it’s not unlikely that you’ll lose to someone who’s simply been throwing a jab for the entire duration of the fight. Exhibition mode against the cpu is far more enjoyable. Here you get to command real boxers, and with an impressive line-up, that’s probably less accessible to people who aren’t boxing fans, but for followers of the sport the selection offers a wide range of recognisable names. There is a slight snag in that you can only fight weight for weight (or one weight above) but it can offer an easier ride than the ultra steep learning curve of jumping straight into a career.

As a boxing fan, when playing for fun, I can put a lot of Prizefighters problems on the back burner. As a reviewer, I can’t. Simply put, as a game it’s heavily flawed, which isn’t to say it doesn’t have it’s great points. The career mode documentary execution is genuinely entertaining and original, the training mini games are fun and addictive, the line up of classic and present boxers is impressive, the music is good, the arenas (22 of them!) all look very good indeed, but the core gameplay really lets Prizefighter down. Coupling this with very clumsy in-fight graphics and I can see how it would cause upset among the more casual of fight fans. Perhaps the most colossal of all the negatives is the fact that the ring girls aren’t quite as buxom as those in Fight Night. Come on 2KSports get your priorities straight!