Fight Night Round 4

It'll be alright on the night? We go a few rounds with EA Canada's relentlessly pretty virtual punchbag.

	Version 360, (PS3)	Developer EA	Publisher EA	Genre Boxing

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Not all of the game is as colourful as the Create-a-Boxer feature, sadly. Legacy mode is a step up from the previous game's wonky, bare-bones career mode, but it still feels quite dry in comparison to older EA fighting games like the engagingly silly Def Jam: Fight for New York. Rather than the hoped-for sprawling, gilded narrative compound of nods to classic boxing flicks, you're given a glorified leaderboard, ring-fenced by six training exercises, an in-game "email" system which coughs up vacuous nuggets from trainers, managers and rivals, a few sheaves of boxer stats and a calendar where you can schedule fights.

Training has seen the most improvement over Fight Night Round 3: besides boosting certain stats, the exercises will actually teach you how to play the game. Working the double end bag, for instance, will both strengthen your punches and encourage you to split them effectively between the face and body, while a few bouts with the heavy bag will help tighten your combos. Brushing up between fights is still more necessary than fun, though; you can always automate it if you'd rather skip the mild tedium (and additional loading times) in exchange for reduced benefits.

Same goes for fights themselves, but you'll rarely want to miss out on these. EA's stick-based Total Punch Control system continues to be far more evocative of actually serving up a few knuckle sandwiches than doddery old button inputs. The right stick becomes your boxer's torso, in effect, facing north: twitch it up-left and up-right for jabs and straights, roll it left or right then up for left and right hooks, and pull it down-right or down-left then up for uppercuts. Holding left trigger segues to body punches. Where Fight Night Round 3 packed three, sensationally imbalanced breeds of haymaker, one of which thrust you dizzyingly into your opponent's perspective, Fight Night Round 4 brings just the one, executed by holding right bumper and throwing a hook.

With the sting taken out of bigger hits, there's much more emphasis on setting up combos with your jab. In fact, the game has swung a bit too far in this direction: it's rather easy to win judges over with unscientific machine gun flurries, even against the toughest opponents. Defence has been streamlined a touch: holding right trigger plus up or down on right stick blocks high and low, while left trigger plus left stick is used to lean. The face buttons meanwhile get sorry leftovers in the form of clinching, pushing, illegal blows and a goofy signature move.

One of the previous game's big selling points was sheer visual fidelity, its towering, heaving, flexing character models fountaining high resolution sweat from every lovingly rendered tendon. So lifelike were the boxers that EA left the game's HUD off by default, boasting that players could read the ebb and flow of battle in the bruises, gasps and slowing movements of the combatants. Incredibly, Fight Night Round 4 looks even better (providing you focus on the boxers that is - ringside audiences wouldn't feel out of place in Grand Theft Auto 3), its masterful hit response and physics systems allowing sloppy punches to slip and slide over their targets like the clumsy paws of an amorous alcoholic. The HUD, however, is back in.

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