In video games, boxing fans have been left waiting far too long for a legitimate competitor to emerge. Punch-Out pioneered this genre, while Fight Night Champion is the final real heavyweight, having raised the standard with its significant emphasis on realism more than ten years ago in 2010. Though there is some disagreement on the matter, it is evident that developer Steel City Interactive’s Undisputed needs to put in a little more time on the speed bag before it can put an end to this specific dispute. Undisputed is the game that looks to unseat the king.
Undisputed deserves praise for its superb job of simulating the ascent through the boxing ranks credibly through its Career Mode. I was pleased by the character customization choices as soon as I started. Thanks to its intricate character model system, players can design a persona that is intimidating and serious or attempt to mimic real-life fighters with a plethora of haircuts, tattoos, and costume options. The creation center allows you to create absurd monsters that resemble the WWE 2K series. For example, you can stretch out faces, give enormous dumbo ears, or sport a green afro that looks like a chia pet.
Undisputed offers a variety of fighting styles in addition to its inventive visuals, both in terms of gaming mechanics and animation. Use your reach to become an Outside Fighter who takes down an opponent’s health with quick jabs and saps their stamina by evading rather than blocking, or float like Muhammad Ali to create an offensive-mind bruiser akin to Mike Tyson.
I used The Wall archetype to construct a character who was mostly focused on defense. The benefit of an enhanced guard to lessen the damage of incoming blows and an increase in accuracy for landing punches outweighed the trade-off, even though I may have lost strength and power in the process. In the end, I found that this worked well, but it took some getting used to because of my lack of strength and speed and how slow Undisputed fights feel when you first start Career Mode and have lower stats.
When stats are lower at the beginning of Career Mode, fights feel slow.
For my first four fights, my character’s stamina was gone after just a few blows, leading to several matches ending by decision. In Undisputed, this is the one area where reality may deplete my gaming endurance just as quickly as my character can. After losing two or three rounds, I was losing my cool and wishing that fights were handled more like arcade games; all I wanted to do was take someone out.
Fortunately, Undisputed’s strategy for arranging each match kept me interested even when the fights themselves didn’t. It mimics how negotiations and opponent training happen in real life by taking an RPG-style approach. Almost everything was under my control; I could choose the opponent (up to a point, of course), how much money I got from the battle, and even how much time I had to spend publicizing the match on social media.
You can gain benefits to significant aspects like renown, attribute enhancements, and training time by negotiating successfully before each competition. Gaining more notoriety makes you fight better opponents, and beating better opponents raises your earnings and boosts your stats. It is important to balance time and resources wisely because you will need to strengthen your qualities before engaging in these battles.
In addition, you have to manage a lot of tasks in the weeks before an event. They can be used for resting to build endurance and make sure you are injury-free, training to get in fighting shape, or using social media to gain the necessary amount of exposure to qualify for a fight. Another important factor is weight. If you train and recover too much, you may get overweight and the fight will not count. This not only means you will lose out on money and fame, but you also run the danger of getting hurt for no benefit.
It felt great to find the ideal combination of power punches and jabs.
Lastly, it is critical to manage your Coach, Cutman, and Manager’s contracts in Undisputed. Every staff member has special skills and benefits that enhance your fighter’s qualities, and they advance with every victory you achieve. Initially, I wanted to work with the same manager throughout my career, hoping to have a relationship akin to that of Rocky and Mickey. But as my career progressed, the benefits of remaining with the same team began to outweigh the drawbacks. Yes, I lost a few boosts when I had to start over with a new coach, but I was able to replace the original team easily as Career Mode progressed because of the more ability slots and identical basic stats that came with the better staff members. Having to turn down more significant perks to fire my devoted team made that choice more difficult to make.
Once I was back in the ring, I could be more active thanks to my enhanced stats. It did not take me many fights to get used to Undisputed’s combat style and pace. It was satisfying to figure out the ideal mix of powerful punches and fast jabs, as well as how to target the opponent’s body or head based on their guard and areas of vulnerability. Similar to real life, damage accumulates and is a major factor in battles.
If you aim a strong combination of jabs and hard hook blows consistently at one side of the head, you will land terrible wounds or bulging eyes. These have an impact on accuracy and other statistics, but they can also result in technical knockouts (TKOs), in which case the referee ends the bout. But the longer Undisputed I played, the more I felt that these techniques were inferior to the 14-year-old Fight Night Champions.
There are several various kinds of cuts, bruises, and swelling in that game. A cutman minigame is also available in between each round. Completing it will grant the fighter’s health and wear-and-tear an additional stat boost. In contrast, Undisputed’s wear-down characteristics are restricted to the same three injuries—bruises, cuts, and swelling—that appear during each fight, which rapidly grows monotonous. Additionally, there is not a cutman minigame or any interaction to break up the monotony in between rounds.
Verdict
Although there is still a long way to go, developer Steel City Interactive’s strategy for boxing in Undisputed is headed in the right direction. Important building pieces are its emphasis on realism, use of RPG-like mechanisms to prepare for battles, and creation of an exhilarating experience in the ring. However, it falls short of the high standards set by the Fight Night series in the late 2000s in terms of the smoothness of its gameplay animations and the responsiveness of its commentators, and its realistic fighting can be a bit monotonous if you are more of a fan of KOs than TKOs. Even yet, it is a far better dinner than what we have had in the past ten years for an otherwise starving genre.
