Reviews of EA Sports UFC 4

EA Sports UFC 4

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sirvalkyerie

Abandoned

PlayStation 4

EA UFC 4 sucks. It's just not a good game. And I'm a huge MMA fan and an active sports gamer. Even EA games. But EA UFC 4 just ain't it.

I'll commend EA Sports for the humongous amount of free content updates. Constantly adding new fighters over several years and changing overalls. I'll also commend them for adding modes fans asked for like the standup only mode. Not only are these atypical pro-fan decisions for EA but they're ones you don't see from lots of studios.

There are some things to like. The social media engagement, which is an ever-growing important aspect of the UFC experience, is a positive one and gives you some investment in emergent storytelling when you get shit talked by Omari Akhmedov. For the most part Jon Anik and DC are one of the best video game commentary teams. Rarely are they annoying and they usually have on target things to say. Overall, the bones of a really good career mode are there. But this is about where the shine wears off.

The striking game is deep and there are varied ways to throw a large number of strikes and combos. However, the controls are not particularly responsive and strikes tend to land so heavily that you can rarely pull off some of the more intricate combos. The wrestling portion of the game is flat out garbage. The clinch seems almost random and hardly even surface-level deep. There is hardly any underhook pummeling or clinch cage engagement at all and rarely are there meaningful opportunities to use the clinch to facilitate takedowns. The ground game is shallow though somewhat improved from previous iterations. The actual gameplay mechanics the whole way 'round pale in comparison to UFC Undisputed which is now over a decade old.

The game itself chugs outside of gameplay. Even the menus feel sluggish. The in-game rendered cutscenes for career mode move at what feels like 20 FPS, at best. And the sin of it all is that it really doesn't look that good. Fighters look lifeless and have ridiculous eye and mouth movements (reminiscent of buggy release-day Mass Effect Andromeda). Your coach looks like Kenny "The Jet" Smith if Kenny had suffered third-degree burns over 90% of his body. With the exception of a few select fighters, no one looks particularly good.

Fight animations are bizarre and lead to wacky collision modelling. Simultaneously thrown kicks can cause fighters to flip or slam to the ground in highly unusual ways, shattering any sort of immersion. Every strike lands with maximum impact causing fighters to buckle even at jabs. Of course other times you'll clearly land a shot but the game has deemed it 'blocked' and so it hits like nothing at all. It's all so jagged and anything but fluid. Even worse is that you could forgive the game for the irritating striking interactions as a limitation to dealing with modelling the real time physics of the fight game. But other times there are completely animation locked interactions that make you feel completely without agency.

Even on the highest difficulties, perhaps especially on the highest difficulties, everything on the feet feels like an instant KO. Meanwhile the ground game bizarrely saps stamina aggressively from the fighter in top control. I was able to allow people to regularly takedown my fighters and in their struggle to maintain top control I could sub them with ease. Seriously something like an 80% win rate when I did that, because even getting your ass beat on bottom took more stamina out of the top fighter. With flick reversals and a little AI cheesing most skillsets also seem to go completely out of the window. I was just as likely to pull of KOs as CM Punk as I am to land submissions with Conor McGregor and still equally as likely to have the same happen to me.

The career mode presentation is poor, too. It starts out with this unskippable cheesy and annoying sort of story based gameplay that EA loves to do with its single player careers the last half decade. And as always it sucks. Thankfully this one is shorter than most. But there are so many little trimmings missing from the career mode that make it highly unengaging. You cannot call fighters out a priori. You have to be invited to do so when the game triggers it randomly. You cannot check fight cards and see results, you only get notified by the tweets on the right side of the career home screen. You can't even see the fight cards that you yourself are on. This makes the randomly generated fighters even more lifeless because you can't follow their careers.

Training follows an identically repeating cycle of trying to maintain/reach peak condition while not overworking yourself given the specific number of limited training points. The real issue with this is that it's a solved puzzle. You hype your fight a few times then rotate between sparring in your favorite discipline and hitting the heavybag. It's rarely requires any thought and all of the training types are braindead easy. it's nowhere near as engaging as the combine drills in Madden of yesteryear or the fight camps in Fight Night Round 3. Eventually you just spam your way through the same inane training routine every week while first-round-finishing any opponent you face no matter the difficulty. Make a grappler and spam all the grappling skills because even with really low striking attributes you'll be able to KO 4 out of every 5 opponents anyway. And if you can't you can sub them with ease.

And then there's the online play. Which wildly ranges in the skill level of your opposition but also has the added bonus of terrible net code. Most matches are jittery rubber band fests with someone screeching over the mic. I found most players online to try and 'cheese' by using the ground game. I find there's an implicit assumption that your opponent won't be good at the ground game and so you can spam your way to armbar victories. In the matches that did run smoothly it was mostly grappling and counter grappling until one of the gassed fighters got KO'd or subbed. usually in round one. Not fun but definitely more engaging than fighting the AI.

So, what's the summary? The game looks mediocre and plays worse. The career mode is an inch deep and an inch wide. Online plays is completely hit or miss everytime you queue up. The redeeming qualities are that striking is somewhat fluid and the Anik+DC commentary team is enjoyable. The game was free with PS+ this month and I still feel a little sad that I wasted a few days playing this anyway.

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