Review: UFC Undisputed 2010

UFC Undisputed 2010 is the sequel to last year’s UFC Undisputed 2009. Last year’s title was a good game that lacked in some key areas. The most noticeable was a complete lack of left handed, or southpaw, fighters. Lack of features like that hurt what was overall a well made game. With 2010, THQ and Yukes (most famous for the WWE series of games) set out to improve upon the areas in which 2009 lacked.

First Impressions

On the load up for the first time, there are already a few complaints. First, it must connect to XBL before it lets you play. It was taking forever to connect last night, so a restart of the Xbox360 would mean waiting through five minutes of “Connecting…” before even getting to the first menu. Then it would pester me to download DLC, the Online DLC (yes, you have to download it). I finally redeemed my code for Online play (on the back of the manual) just so it would stop bugging me. The “Connecting…” delay is obnoxious and took anywhere between one and five minutes. Not a good start overall. Load times for the game aren’t all that great either. It could be that I’m playing from the disc on a vertical Xbox, but simple things like loading up a custom shirt for your Create-A-Fighter takes a good ten seconds.

Finally after all that, I loaded up the tutorial. I played the demo and I got the basics of stand up fighting, but clinches and ground fighting completely escaped me. I played through the tutorial to understand how all that worked. It helped a lot. The tutorial is well detailed and is recommended for first timers to the Undisputed system.

Presentation

The presentation for the game is very good looking. Menus are sleek and easy to navigate. The bouts themselves feel like watching a TV or PPV broadcast. The commentators for the fights are also decent. They can be repetitive at time, but no more so than other sports games. In Career mode they will reference previous fights that your fighter has had and give some analysis of mid-match highlights. It definitely feels like you’re watching a real UFC fight.

Gameplay

Gameplay between 2009 and 2010 is largely unchanged. The addition of Southpaws leads to new host of animations to accommodate their fighting style. The control scheme is mostly the same with only one change, when you’re in a submission you no longer mash the face buttons to get out of it, instead the right stick is rotated clockwise. Grapple and clinch transitions are still performed by swinging the right stick in various arcs; your strikes are still done with the use of face buttons. Anyone that’s played 2009 will have no trouble adapting to 2010.

Graphics

Graphic wise, the game is polished. Sponsor logos adorn the ring, your coaches and trainers cheer you on from the outside, the crowd looks good in the darkness (house lights are turned down). Bruce Buffer looks like Bruce Buffer. This year, longer hair models have been added and there is some minor clipping issues with them during clinches. It’s not that big of a deal as it is not that noticeable. The biggest concern with the graphics is the re-use of models. Because Yukes packed in 100 fighters, more than they’ve done for any WWE game, some of the models are reused. Certain fighters look like they changed the skin tone and the face model while leaving everything else the same. This mostly goes for the lower card and lesser known fighters. The big name guys like Brock Lesnar and Rampage Jackson all have distinct and unique character models.

Audio

Audio is probably the most lacking feature of UFC 2010. The menu music is cheesy generic rock with no licensed music, which is a norm these days. It’s a short loop of the same riffs on repeat. I wound up turning off the music and putting on some music of my own. Voice acting is hit or miss. Dana White does a good job in the career mode with his parts but the voice actors for CAFs lack emotion and have no passion in their voice. On the positive side, the fight sounds are good. When you hit someone with a big shot the sound reflects that. A strong shot provides an ample thud when it connects while a weaker one is more of a tap sound. You really know when shots are connecting from the audio clues.

Career Mode
Career mode is a big emphasis this year as well. They didn’t want you to just climb a ladder of fighters but to experience training, media events and other aspects of being a UFC fighter. There is an added aspect of managing your relationship with other fighters that sets up rivalries and friend ships. But career mode has its issues.

Heading into Create-A-Fighter to make Justin Sane, the Light Heavyweight kicking and takedown master. I noticed as I was creating him that “Hmm, they certainly give you a lot of creation points to start with.” Why? Because this is literally Create-A-Fighter. You can’t load these guys into the career. When you start a new career, it takes you to the Create-A-Fighter screen but without all the creation points. There is nothing warning you about this. I wound up having to make Justin Sane twice, though I think my second one came a lot better. One of things that’s neat is you can put sponsor logos on your gear, meaning your shorts, t-shirt and hat. The only two sponsors available to me off the bat where THQ and Yukes. I tossed their logos on all my gear just to jazz up my stuff a little.

And we’re off into my life as a professional fighter! The first thing they do is offer you to do the tutorial. I skipped it as I already played through it. Then they let you pick your first amateur fight. The amateur fights are different in that the guys are ranked by order of difficulty. Meaning the 4 difficulty settings and not some sort of ranking or rating. There’s also only 4 weeks before fights. During those off weeks, you have a couple options. Training which works on your base stats and is automatic, Sparring which works on your more detailed stats and can be automatic or manual (more on that later), Camp Invite which lets you learn your special moves, Rest which is what it sounds like and Game Plan which lets you pick bonus stats for the next fight. On top of all that, there’s two stats that have to be balanced before going into your fight. Conditioning and Fatigue. You want to have Conditioning as close to 100 before your fight and Fatigue as close to 0 as possible. It’s a tough thing to balance. You can also be injured if you try training, sparring or going to camp with too much fatigue.

In my case, I fought three amateur fights before moving onto the pros. A max of five fights is available and it’s recommended to do all five. When you become pro, they drop you into a minor league. They also make you pick your difficulty. This matters for not just the fights themselves but also for Sparring. They penalize you forty percent in Beginner, twenty percent in normal, no penalty in the third tier difficulty and give you a twenty percent bonus in the hardest. The minor league is made up of a fake league and fake fighters. The fights are awkward since there is no commentary or Buffer intros to go with them. It’s just the crowd and the fighters. A bit odd with silence. The game lets you pick your opponent and they tell you where on the card the fight will be. The ranking starts at thirty and you start at Unranked. I do my first bit of training and I am terrible at Sparring. I’m earning so little points that I notice all my skills have dropped to zero.

As I later learned, skills decay when you don’t put points into them. And they decay fast. The same goes for your basic three stats. They’ll drop four points in a week if you don’t train them enough. When my stats and skills cap at forty early on, dropping from twenty eight to twenty four is a huge drop. I really don’t know what the hell to do at this point but I head into my first fight. I spent most of the match dropping kicks into the mid section, ruining my opponent’s stamina. I left some obvious welts as his rib and stomach area turned bright red. Everyone always remarks on face damage, but the body damage is done well. Eventually my rib kicks put him on the ground and I got on top. Some haymakers finished off my opponent and I had my first professional victory.

At this point, I decided I wanted a knockout move and went into the Camp Invite section. There’s a lot of camps to select from and I selected American Top Team and decided to learn the Muy Thai Left Leg Head Kick. To do this, I had to land 2-hit combos using the new move. It took me two training sessions to learn it, but if I was better I could have done it in one (later, I went to Brazillian Top Team and learned GSP’s Right Head Kick in one session, then back to American Top Team to upgrade my Left Kick to level 2, that took two sessions. Then again back to ATT to learn the Flying Head Kick which I learned in one session). One thing I noted is that my training partner at ATT is Thiago Silva and my relationship with him improved as we trained. Now I have a real KO move and I’m still trying to figure out how to keep my skills and stats from decaying. And most importantly, how to do Sparring effectively.

Post-fight, you get Cred Bonus based on the fight and your sponsors. As you win, the sponsors you put on your gear upgrade to be better (for example, THQ and Yukes started out worth twenty cred per item they are on but I now have up ranked up to level five and they’re worth sixty each) and you earn better sponsors. When cred reaches certain thresholds, you can upgrade your either the Training or Sparring. In my case, because my skills were so bad I upgraded my Sparring partner. This gave me a twenty percent bonus to my points, effectively canceling out the twenty percent penalty I have for being on a lower difficulty. It also raises the cap on my skills from forty to sixty. The same would go for my Training if I upgraded that. But the two things I learned the most was about the stat decay. There are “caps” in place, so if you get a skill or stat past thirty it won’t decay below thirty. The two caps are fifty and seventy. All this means that the way to train early is put your “main” skills to thirty and then work on the other ones as you go. In my case, that meant my Takedown and my Stand Up Offense – Kicking skills should go to thirty first. The other advice is that you only need to put 1 point into a skill to reset the decay timer. So you can pump your main skills and drop single points into the other ones to prevent their decay.

I won my next couple fights, improving my record to 10-0 and in the process I became the number seven ranked Light Heavyweight. One of those wins was against Tito Ortiz, who I had the pleasure of knocking out in the second round. After the fight, Joe Rogan approached me in a post fight interview and I was able to disrespect Tito twice. By contrast, I had a fight with my ATT training partner Thiago Silva and I showed him respect in the post fight. On my relationships screen Tito was fast in not liking me while Thiago was somewhat of a friend. I’m not sure how this plays out in the long run but any time Tito Ortiz does not like you it is a good day. Dana White came by to see me again and offered me a spot on the upcoming UFC pay per view. I picked Forrest Griffin as my opponent.

This is where the first real issue with Career mode pops up. When you crack the top ten in ranking the game cranks the difficulty way up. In my first ten fights I was winning close matches in the first two rounds but Forrest beat me in less than thirty seconds. I’m not even sure if I landed a strike. He put me on the ground, I could not escape and he made me tap. For anyone that doesn’t follow UFC, Griffin is a bad submission fighter so for him to make you tap is pretty embarrassing. This process repeated itself against other top ten fighters. There is no difficulty curve here; it is a brick wall of frustration. This difficulty problem plagued the 2009 version and it is really detrimental to see it remain in 2010.

Overall

UFC Undisputed 2010 is a great game and is a must buy for any UFC fan. It is by no means perfect as there are a few annoyances with certain aspects of the game and there have been network issues over the first few days. But THQ and Yukes have done a good job capturing the immersion of the UFC and improving on last year’s effort. Career mode is deep, the graphics look good and the game play is fun. A recommended purchase for sure.

8/10

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