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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Your health bar recharges over time, as long as you afford it the leisure by intercepting incoming fire, while stamina decreases when you go on the offensive. Exhaust the latter with uninterrupted punches and your boxer's arms will start to sag, flopping feebly against your opponent's defences, and making it easier for him to roll out a devastating counter punch. Get clocked particularly hard and there's a chance you'll be stunned, which can prompt a trip to the boards if you don't clinch the other chap pronto and prevent him landing the killer blow. Besides dragging down your stats, injuries such as facial cuts and swellings may cause your corner team to throw in the towel if left unmanaged.

Your trainer will bark the odd injunction as you fight, and heeding his wisdom earns you more points to spend on health, stamina or injury recovery between rounds. Here again, things have been cut back a little from Fight Night Round 3: there's no mini-game to soothe those unsightly gashes, just the choice of whether you assign points yourself or defer to your trainer.

The AI gets off to a slow start, but finds its footing around the five hour mark. Lower-ranking boxers are sparing with their punches and tend to circle helplessly once you've hammered through a third of their health, but the pros are made of sterner stuff, chasing you round the ring after scoring a stunning blow, and trying for haymaker knockouts if you're ahead on the score cards. There's a welcome sense that each fighter is very much his own entity, one preferring to push you into a corner and spam body shots, another favouring straight punches from a distance. Nevertheless, certain features do recur - everybody's got countering down to a fine, computerised art - and after a while you'll want to drag a mate in for less predictable scraps, or take your pet boxer online.

It's hard to say how the online component will pan out post-release, with other players thin on the ground at present, but what's there works well enough. Besides lag-free one-off matches there's a World Championship, which equalises everybody's stats and leaves you to batter your way to possession of one of three weight titles through skill alone. Less pugnacious community features include the option to share and rate each other's boxing prodigies, and upload match replays for public consumption. There's also a passive ticker tape which carries sporting news from the ESPN, if you care for that sort of real-world intervention.

As far as updates to already successful formulas go, Fight Night Round 4 is textbook. It sends some of its predecessor's balancing issues and more gratuitous (if not uninteresting) features packing, straightens out the career mode a little and treats some already face-breaking visuals to a noticeable makeover. Within the ring, the series has never looked or fought better, despite skewing towards rapid-fire punches; without it, there's perhaps still work to be done. Not quite a knock-out punch, then, but enough to leave your jaw rattling.

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