OurColony.net

Fell for the trap

Customer Rating:
I bought this game because I played Fight Night Round 3 and absolutely loved it. The TPC was hard to get used to but made the game alot of fun once you got the hang of it. But, in Fight Night Round 4, they ruined it. From what I played, you can no longer choose the strength of your punch. You throw a generic strength hook and where it hits is 100% of how damage seems to be calculated. This means no toying with weaker opponents and no throwing punches while conserving energy. You either punch and hit or don't punch at all. For how I play, this game is now 100% unbeatable. EA should have done the usual and just added a couple bells and whistles, not revamp an already amazing system. If you want a good boxing game with decent realism, get Fight Night Round 3. If you need a game to burn for warmth, I fully recommend this game.

Did not live up to the hype or improve on previous fight night.

Customer Rating:
I've played the previous Fight Nights and they've each made improvements upon the previous ones and built upon what was successful and implemented changes which generally made sense and felt as though they were refining their fight system. However, with Fight Night Round 4 they've changed the fight dynamics to an extent where even a Fight Night veteran is easily lost wondering what the developers intended and what is the rhythm they are looking for in the ring. They claim that style makes fights in this game but honestly there is only one style that dominates and wins and that is counter-punching after slipping or performing "perfect" blocks. On one level it makes sense as you're effectively capitalizing on your opponent's mistakes and making your own opportunities but the problem is that nothing else is really effective. You can be an aggressive fighter and successfully unload 3-4-5 punch combinations round after round but you'll somehow do less damage than someone who can pull off a half dozen counter punches. In a boxing match, if you were to catch someone in the middle of his punch and counter it with a nice power shot you'd probably would do some heavy damage but in this game anything that is parried correctly leaves you open to a punch that does 5 times damage than the same punch if you pulled it off in a normal exchange. It's pretty ridiculous to parry a jab or cross and have the chance to unload some Rocky Balboa hay-maker but that's exactly what you have in FNR4.

Overall, the developers wanted to create a game that was somehow truer to the challenges you'd face as a boxer but under the restraints and controls of a videogame. Unfortunately, it didn't really work and you're left with a game wondering what the heck they were thinking when they change the game dynamics so much. I mean the previous Fight Night was perhaps less realistic but it was still ultimately a fun video game which unfortunately FNR4 is not. I'm lucky that I never came around to buying the game until Christmas 09 when it was selling for $15-20 as opposed to paying full price when it came out because it's left a bad taste as it is and I think I'm going to hang up my gloves with the Fight Night series after this one.

Fight Night Round 4

Customer Rating:
As with almost all EA Sports games they just add a few new features and slap a price tag on it like they do with the Madden series. Its just a fast way that they make money. The game play is about the same in Fight Night Round 4 as it is in Fight Night Round 3. To pay almost $70 for this new is crazy your better off getting it used for $14 at the most. Don't get me wrong i like a few EA sports games its just when they tweak these games every year you pay for the same thing you got the year before and these days its hard to return a game that you opened and they know this. Game designers have lost there way of designing games and got greedy along the way. They just don't put the time to really improve a game from the year before.

Can be really fun, but not realistic

Customer Rating:
Man, if you knew how much I was anticipating the release of this game... For months, I read every piece of info realeased on this game and talked about it so much because of that the developers said would be in the game... I was really happy when I first played it, but it's majorly lacking in other areas.

Head to head with a real person is what makes this game so fun. Fights actually go to a decision unlike FNR3. The fights are often nailbiting slugfests that have great, I said GREAT back and forth action. So it's great to play online unless you play some guy that fights cheap of course, and it's fun against friends. This unfortunately is where the fun ends for the most part.

Like another guy brought up, the reaction times are a little too slow at times. The in/out fighting is really flawed and unrealistic. You can't effectively outbox a guy like you should be able to, or like they advertised you'd be able to and the "in" fighting is awkward with guys making awkward movement or awkward punching. Punchers like Kelly Pavlik are brutal from the outside, but completely useless on the inside which isn't all true for their style. Sure he's better from the outside with fighters at the end of his reach, but he's not completely useless when someone is close. That's how the game has made him. You can apply this to about half of the roster too unfortunately.

Body punching is next to useless on this game. It takes away stamina, but that's about it. The only knockouts from the body is if the guy can't possibly take another jab without going down and you happen to hit him to the body, he'll go down. That is not at all realistic. In real boxing, I would almost contend that most knockouts come from body shots. From amateurs on up, most dudes HATE getting hit to the body and it slows them WAY down taking punches to the body, not the case in this game.

The career mode is a total joke. Half of the good guys in your division or the real fighters on the roster retire by the time you get to fight them unless you previously rank them at like 38-28. Who wants to fight the best guys at the beginning of your career? Wouldn't you rather beat Mosley, JC Chavez then Pacquiao to unify the Welterweight crown? Not gonna happen, most of them retire before you get to that point no matter what. Even if you're in line for a title shot after 15 fights with hardly any training, which also leads you way over matched because you didn't train as much as you should've anyways. So you're left to fight fictional guys. Keep in mind, even if you win the title with less than 20 fights, you'll be defending it against the same 6 guys for the rest of your career pretty much. Another thing is, the fighters have ridiculous, unrealistic records. You'll be fighting someone that is like 26-19-0 with 1 kayo that's the champ. That might be realistic in MMA, but not boxing. You'd sooner be fighting a guy that has 5 losses or less, and that would be if the guy fought nearly 50 times and he'd sure as heck have more than 1 kayo. What's the fun in that? You're beating a guy for a title that has 19 losses already? Not to mention you're probably going to fight him at least 4 more times over your career.

Gameplay:
Counterpunching reigns supreme. I used to box, and yes, counterpunching is really effective if you do it correctly. But to barely miss a guy and still have your shoulders squared up to the guy after missing, hands in position ready to block but can't just because they programmed it that way and you get damn near knocked out by a counter JAB is completely stupid and ridiculous. I could see you getting knocked down and even out if it was a counter hook/uppercut/straight right etc... but from a jab, as often as it happens is plain stupid.

There's a million more flaws with this game too, but I figured this was enough to get the points across. This game had all the potential in the world with a few minor tweaks. It's a damn shame that the guys at EA didn't consult with REAL boxers other than to match their styles. If they did, those boxers don't know anything about actual fighting because it's not realistic. It's possible to have a realistic boxing game that is as much fun as an arcade game. I hope next time they don't miss that mark

Disappointing...

Customer Rating:
Back in 2005, I picked up fight night round 2 for the PS2. It had been years since I played a boxing game, but I always remember Mike Tyson's punch out fondly, so I decided to give it a shot. And while Fight Night is dramatically different from the arcade style of Punch Out, it never disappointed me. Until now. EA had a great franchise going. The difference in graphics and gameplay between round 2 and round three was astonishing, and good. Then came the announcement of Round 4 and I could barely contain my excitement. So far, EA had done everything right. I should have expected them to mess up.

Pros:
Visually amazing.
Still satisfying to watch your boxer split a guy's lip in slomo.

Cons:
Everything else.
The training games are insanely hard.
It's more difficult than ever to get up after a knock down.
EA all but removed the use/need for a cut man.
Because of the difficulty of training, it's possible to win your first ten or so fights before you plateau and the computer keeps on making strides.
The new controller layout sucks. There's a reason they put out a patch to allow players the use of the buttons for punches.

Final Thoughts:
This games isn't even worth a rental. It seems like they removed everything that was good about Round 3 and replaced it with something terrible. I'm not giving up on EA though. Maybe Round 4 is there version of Windows Vista...