Over the past couple years the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) has been making moves to try and become accepted as a legitimate professional sport all around the globe. The company’s head-honcho Dana White is pushing the company into all new areas and part of that is the upcoming video game from publisher THQ and experienced Japanese developer Yuke’s. Last week we have had the opportunity to spend a good bit of time with the final build of UFC 2009 Undisputed and came away very pleased with the sport’s first true outing (we can’t count the previous games as they were so horrid) into our beloved industry. The most important aspect to get right with this game was the actual gameplay mechanics, without a strong foundation there is no hope for a long-term franchise success.
Luckily the strongest component of Undisputed is the actual MMA fighting mechanics. After speaking with the developers and producers of the game it was obvious that their most difficult hurdle was creating not only a good boxing game, but a good wrestling/grappling one as well. Merging those two criteria together was crucial in recreating the MMA experience in a virtual form. If either side was wonky or overly balanced fans would instantly pick up on the downfalls and the game would fail miserably. Picking up Yuke’s to work behind the scenes was a genius move as it allowed a lot of the good aspects to be brought into UFC 2009 Undisputed while still leaving room to create from scratch the MMA features.
The two different parts of MMA, stand-up (boxing) and ground-game (wrestling) are controlled using the face buttons and thumb-sticks. When boxing the controls is very simple, each of the different face buttons is assigned to either a left or right hand punch/kick. During our time with the game we found that our enjoyment was equally separated between both the boxing and wrestling portions of gameplay. People who do not even know what UFC stands for will be able to pick up the controller and throw down in one hell of a boxing match, but the true player will quickly take them to the ground and pull a quick submission.
