Fight Night Round 3

With some of the most impressive graphics available, can EA Sports Fight Night Round 3 punch its way to victory?

The lights beam down onto the empty ring, the crowd cheer and chant as the announcer calls your name. You enter the ring with one thought on your mind, your opponent. Welcome to EA Sports Fight Night Round 3, the third instalment in their Fight Night Series.
 
Fight Night Round 3 gives you the opportunity to create your own character (you need to create a separate character for online play) which you can customise how you like. The ‘create a character’ process isn’t as in-depth as other character creation modes you may have used in the past, but it isn’t too feeble an attempt either. In the career mode, you take your boxer from amateur (you even wear the protective headgear) all the way to the status as one of the greatest boxers of all time.

This third instalment also introduces a new addition to the series, ‘Rivals’. Unfortunately, apart from meeting them more often than other fighters, they don’t bring much else to the experience.

Boxing games have never been known for in-depth gameplay, often being denoted to simple button bashing. With Fight Night Round 3 it’s all about timing, reading your opponents movements and looking for the signs and opportunities to attack

In the career mode of the game, the level of difficulty is increased after the first couple of stages. You begin to find yourself spending more time defending, taking time working out your opponent’s weaknesses and waiting for the right moments to strike. In spite of this, the difficulty level can seem a little confused at times. While more often than not, we found ourselves winning bouts via knockouts in the first rounds and then at other times we found it nigh impossible to get any hits in at all.

Fight Night Round 3 has some well-rounded and realistic boxing gameplay. It’s undoubtedly the closest you can get to boxing without having to take the full force of a haymaker yourself. The realism of the game is strengthened with the lack of HUD. This brings with it a whole new level of gameplay to the boxing genre; it pushes you to asses the visual characteristics of your opponent, thinking about your movements and the timing of attacks.

Ultimately, the gameplay does suffer from monotony, which doesn’t bode well on long bouts of play, but in short bursts everything seems to sit in place well, especially when playing online.

Despite blatant advertising and annoying music, there are some genuinely excellent audio elements in the game. Some of the actual sound effects are most impressive, such as the slow-motion knockout punch replays. There are times where the sound effects on punches seem to lack effort and can create uncertainty if a punch has landed at all. In saying that, some of the bigger punches (and definitely noticeable in the impact punches) are certainly made known and you really can hear the bone shattering and face pummelling sounds of your opponent meeting the weight of your glove.

The best aspect of sound in Fight Night Round 3 is the commentary. The commentators really do a fantastic job of keeping both the tension and the outlook of the fight well known. It has unquestionably been implemented exceptionally well with some of the most informative commentary in any game. The commentators will inform you of opponents weakness, helpful comments on your (and your opponent’s) state and general comments on the fight overall. The trainers are helpful too, after a round they let you know where you are going wrong. So taking notes from the trainers and commentators is immensely helpful in creating the possibility of turning the table of a fight.