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Genre: Sports Publisher: EA Sports Developer: EA Canada Players: 1-2

By Keith B (6th Jul 2009)

Like Lachlan said recently, there’s nothing exciting about sitting around waiting for EA to release its latest cash cow in any particular sport. Not normally, but EA have been making big steps with most of its sport games, most notably FIFA, and Fight Night 4 has also been given a working over. It doesn’t just have shiner graphics; it’s been rebuilt from the ground up.

The list of positives is huge. It looks amazing, and while previous iterations of the series have always been held in high regard, the latest is simply spectacular. Muscle definition and flexing is paired with a great collision detection system, and it never feels like the thing is missing any of your attempts to box your opponent. The Game Face option also works well and allows you to use a digital camera and upload it to EA online for use on your system, in case you’re not happy with what you can manage with your Xbox Vision camera. The created heads I made looked like me, although my other half laughed when I showed her.

Another great addition is the inclusion of both a massive roster of current fighters and also some classics from the pages of history. Now you can see who would be victorious between Muhammad Ali and Mike Tyson, which is an awful lot of fun.

The control system is also overhauled, and players now have no option but to use the right thumbstick together with the triggers and bumpers to control their blows. Despite being initially hesitant, because I never felt completely in control with this system before, it comes through as solid and more than functional.

Making it more important how you box as opposed to just throwing as many punches as possible, your corner gets points to spend on fixing you up between rounds depending on how well you actually sparred. Landing more than a certain percentage of punches gives you points, as does knocking your opponent down, stunning him, and defending well. You then spend these points to revitalise your health, stamina, or to deal with any cuts that have been inflicted. It’s a great addition and rewards people who try to box properly.

You have a career mode, this time called Legacy, where you take a created fighter from Bum to Greatest Of All Time. Moving up through the different ranks is achieved by fulfilling certain criteria, such as having a certain win percentage, defending your title, and so on. But it’s with the career mode that we had the most concerns. Beneath all the obvious work put into the other facets of the game, the career mode is flawed. Let me explain.



When you create a fighter, you schedule fights yourself in the calendar, and then have a fixed number of training slots in which to work on certain parts of you fighter stat repertoire. After playing each of the five or six mini games once or twice I stopped, and set it to auto train, thus only getting 50% of the bonus, but flying through the game. After I got to rank six in the world, I was destroyed and KOd in a fight, with the reality dawning on me that I only had an overall stat total of 79 and was fighting guys with high 80s to mid-90s. It being my first loss in 16 fights, I became concerned that I wouldn’t be able to make it to the top, and subsequently defend my title enough times to make it as the GOAT.

So instead, I simply trained my fighter so his right arm was up in the 90s (with things like foot speed still down around 55), and then used my right hook cut opponents open and force the ref to stop the fight. By the end of the first round the opponent’s corner had to use any of their points to stop his bleeding, therefore not allowing him to regain any health. By the end of the second round he was even worse, and by the third I’d either knocked him out or the fight would be stopped. To put it in perspective, I defended my titles 22 times with this stupid technique, and when I retired I was 50-1-0, with 50 wins (48 by knockout or TKO). It suddenly made the career mode seem very flawed.

Also, to be fair to the mediocre Don King’s Prizefighter it had a better career mode. The masses of narrative and video diaries is a hell of a lot more developed than the Fight Night 4 one.



Other than career, the multiplayer is very fun indeed and is, perhaps, one of the best games you can crank up when you’ve got people around visiting you. The ability to box using on the thumbstick means that people can bash away while others can use their skills to counter. Playing simple one-on-one online was also effortless and the frantic nature of it means that any slight lag isn’t as much of an issue as it was with UFC Undisputed. The ‘Perfect Block’ feature – where if you block at exactly the right time, the game slows down for a microsecond to allow you to exploit your opponent’s open frame – really forces you to play with your brain online.

There was one massive, massive gripe we had with it, and that was we couldn’t boot it up without unplugging our wireless adapter from the back of the machine, as it would hang at the very first loading screen. We don’t know if it was because we were testing on an Elite, or what, but we first had to delete all our custom music playlists from the hard drive, and when that didn’t work, had to remove the network adapter. It’s a shocking failure and one that needs to be fixed immediately.



There really isn’t much more to say on it. The near-perfect physics are welcome, and watching an opponent’s glove glance of the side of your head because you weaved in time, and therefore causing little or no damage, never gets old. The facial reactions have also been tempered a little adding authenticity, and although the show-mo of a knockdown does show ripples from the impact on the face of the opponent, it now only looks like they’re in an wind tunnel when you pull off a haymaker. Solid online play and brilliant friend play makes this one for the collection, even if the career mode is inherently flawed and can be spammed to complete.

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