Fight Night Champion
Hurt the ones you glove.
But it's the way the story compliments the gameplay that sets Champion Mode apart. Rather than offering 22 straight fights against increasingly difficult opponents, each exchange challenges you in a different way. At first these start out fairly straightforward, but before long you're bare-knuckle scrapping in prisons against headbutt-happy convicts or fighting professional boxing matches with your right hand broken.
These early scenarios teach you the ins and outs of the comprehensive fighting system, while later battles demand you put everything you've learned into practice. And for those who really want to put their skills to the ultimate test, four difficulty settings will see if you have the skills to survive.
As accomplished as the Champion Mode is, the bulk of Fight Night's single-player is in the returning Legacy Mode. In Round 4, this was fairly shallow, but after taking some pointers from EA Sports MMA, EA Canada has graced its career mode with more reasons to keep playing.
While levelling up your character in Round 4 was a simple case of training before a fight in order to raise a handful of attributes, Champion introduces a more complex progression that separates your character's boxing Skills from their physical Athleticism. Skill training takes the form of interactive mini-games and includes four new stand-up games like Get Inside and Stay Outside. These help improve your spacing techniques and every training session nets you a certain amount of XP based on your performance.
These points can be spent on improving your fighter's Skills in 17 areas, and whether you distribute them evenly among your punches and defensive manoeuvres or instead max out your right hook so it gains one-hit-KO potential early on is entirely up to you. This means you have more creative freedom and a lot more to think about between fights.
The flipside of the Skill system is your fighter's Athleticism. At the start of his career your 18-year-old fighter will be in outstanding shape and able to shrug off injuries with ease, but as he gets older and advances through the ranks, you'll need to invest time into athletics programmes so that they can stay physically competitive.
Then by the twilight years of their career – when their Skills are established but each fight takes a greater toll – you'll need to switch over almost exclusively to athletics training as you attempt to defend multiple titles. All these extra considerations make for a more involved Legacy Mode, and when you factor in purses which can be spent on better training camps, you have a more exhaustive simulation that makes you think outside the ring.
Rounding off the Fight Night Champion package is the online functionality which, unfortunately, we haven't been able to sample at the time of writing. EA Canada is promising a similar set-up but with "improved match-up logic", "totally new anti-cheat logic" and "a complete Lobby system for hanging out, talking boxing and matching up". Above anything else, it will need to make sure the netcode is stable.
You can now create your own online Gym by inviting friends to join up with their own boxer creations, allowing you to take part in fights and sparring sessions while earning XP. Once you've got a solid team together you can then instigate a Rival Challenge against another Gym and take part in Rivalry Fights. Then, having risen to the challenge of their rival, the winning Gym will increase in rank with the opportunity to challenge better Gyms – dun dun derrrrrrr.
The Fight Night series has a boxing monopoly, with little in the way of direct competition and a roster that includes over 50 of the world's most famous pugilists past and present – including Muhammad Ali, Mike Tyson, David Haye, Manny Pacquiao, both Sugar Rays and Butterbean. But despite its dominance, EA Canada has deflected any "lazy update" accusations by listening to fan feedback and crafting a game that improves upon its predecessor.
It's far from a revolution – much of the framework will be familiar to Fight Night fans – but as the best-looking and most technically accomplished game the series has yet produced, this evolution exceeds our expectations, without totally blowing us away. Fight Night Champion has both the guts and the glory, and if the online functionality compliments the excellent offline modes, then it's going straight to the top.