Undisputed review — Launching in a Rocky state

From all the way back to the Atari 2600, where two blocks danced around the ring, to the halcyon days of the various Fight Night titles, Creed: Rise to Glory in VR, and Punch-Out for NES, SNES, and Switch, we’ve been chasing the sweet science, waiting for the game that’d let us glove up against the greats. Undisputed is the latest to weigh in for a shot at the belt. Ding, ding – time to put up or shut up.

Let’s be perfectly clear – the sweet science has had a remarkably uneven time in the videogame world. Even the best titles out there struggled with things like footwork, timing, and finding an audience. Undisputed comes to us from freshman indie developer Steel City Interactive out of Sheffield, UK. in partnership with a number of boxing organizations like the World Boxing Organization, International Boxing Federation, and British Boxing Board of Control. Their aim is to create a realistic boxing game that honors the sport. Tough shoes to fill, and with a decade since the last meaningful entry.

Undisputed kicks things off with an in-engine video showcasing some very familiar faces if you follow the sport. They’ve licensed more fighters than any game prior, including the likes of Tyson Fury, Oleksandr Usyk, Deontay Wilder, Rocky Marciano, Roy Jones Jr., Canelo Alvarez, Nigel Benn, Sugar Ray Leonard, Arturo Gatti, Vasili Lomachenko, Jorge Linares, and Sunny Edwards just to name a few. It’s also great to see the late Tommy Morrison here. Thankfully, the best female boxers in the world are also represented with the likes of Seniesa Estrada, Claressa Shields, Franchon Crews Dezurn, Heather Hardy, Terri Harper, Sophie Alisch, and more in the roster. Of course, Muhammad Ali is here, who’s estate seems content to license him into everything under the sun. I swear I saw his face on a slot machine in Vegas when I was there a month ago. I am, however, completely shocked that Layla Ali isn’t here — I don’t know why, but clearly she had something else to do after going 24-0 in her professional career like…let me check my notes…hosting a show named Home Made Simple on the Oprah Winfrey Network. Whatever – her choice, I suppose.

On the main menu, you’ll choose between instant Career, Quick Fight, Online, Prize Fights, and News. In Career mode you’ll pick between a male or female boxer, select your weight class, and then build your look. I’ve chosen to make a boxer that is as much a visual assault as a physical one. Hello Katherine “Tiny” Sanderson, and welcome to the fight. There are a number of customization options, so I naturally went with the worst possible tattoos I can throw on my body – another boxing tradition in the real world. I swear that next to every gym is a tattoo parlor run by a kid who just started the week prior. With my would-be-champion built, it was time to begin in the amateur gyms to start making my name. After a quick three-tier tournament, which I lost in the last round, no matter how many times I tried, I ended up in my gym with a loss to start my career.

To fight you’ll need three things – a coach, a manager, and a cutman. You’ll be making staff decisions so you’ll have to look at their individual stats and make sure they can take care of you while you train, and when things are looking grim in the deeper rounds, if you ever see them. Each will sign on for three, five, or seven fights, granting affinity as you use them more. This affinity is used to unlock various traits and passives you can apply to your fighter such as being able to unleash more damage up close, or being faster with your jab. Each of these have pros and cons, so you’ll have to decide how you shape your boxer as these become available. We’ll get back to those cuts in a bit.

We’re gonna switch gears and talk about graphics for a moment. The graphics for each of the licensed fighters are absolutely magnificent, capturing them in exquisite detail down to every line in their awful tattoos. The rings, environments, and just about everything else looks equally as impressive. What doesn’t look as good is the created, random fighters, or coaches. Half the characters look like they either have Benjamin Button syndrome, appearing like they’re toddlers in baseball caps, like that they are carefully crafted out of plastic, or both. The skin tone that looks so great on licensed likenesses just doesn’t come across with randomized characters, and it’s very distracting when you see these two worlds collide.

Back to the career, you have two choices – build a new character from scratch, as we discussed above, or start your career as one of the pros. You’ll still have scrub stats, but you can at least look like a badass as Roy Jones Jr., aka “Captain Hook” while you grind it out. The experience is essentially the same other than not being able to customize beyond your gear.

Before you take a fight in the career mode, and after you’ve selected your crew, you’ll need to negotiate the terms with your opponent. You’ll choose how much of the purse you’d like to get for a win, how much of the budget is allocated to promotion (earns fame which unlocks higher tier coaches, gear, camps, and more), whether you trigger a rematch automatically, how many weeks will be allocated to training, and more. Your offer will be sent to the other side, and they’ll either counter or accept. You get three bites at the apple, and if you can’t reach an agreement, then that opponent is unavailable and you’ll have to select one of the other two. With your fight secured, it’s time to train.

Surprisingly, you aren’t going to work up a sweat during training – there are no minigames. Selecting from a menu of training items like hitting the heavy bag, working with a training dummy, sparring, and similar activities, you’ll train up your various stats. Your coaching staff adds bonuses to your training results, and each activity has a cost to stamina. You are balancing three meters – weight, fight readiness, and overall energy level. If you’re overweight, the fight is immediately canceled, and if you’re low on energy it’ll be reflected in your overall stamina pool and fighter movements. I’m not sure how the undertrained / overtrained mechanic manifests itself – I wasn’t able to see a difference. If you’re waiting for more here, sorry – that’s it. You won’t be hitting the bag, working your timing, training with other boxers, or anything else. It’s all just hitting the X button on menus and making sure you’ve balanced the meter. Especially for what I’m paying them, it’d be nice if my coach was a little more useful. He’s only too happy to tell me “That was a bad camp” but they aren’t offering any advice on what activities I should be undertaking. Your fighter can pick up an injury, and you can spend money to try to heal it as you spend a training week (or more) on healing, but that’s a button press as well. I can’t say I love playing minigames over and over again, but the last UFC game had it right – you nail it once, then simulate your last result if you want. The fact that there’s nothing here feels like a big gaping hole.

Speaking of your coaching staff, you can’t pull a Mike Tyson and keep your coach through nearly your entire career. Your coach can be leveled up with Coach XP earned each fight, putting points into their individual stats. This will allow you to slowly amp them up to as high as you’d like, including maxing them all out I assume. What doesn’t scale, however, is their skills. Each coach has three skills they can teach you, and once that’s spent, they have no more skills to offer – you’ll have to pack their bags and get somebody else. Your cutman and manager don’t level up, so feel free to fire them at will for somebody with better stats.

With your training camp out of the way, and any media obligations satisfied (it’s another button press that soaks time, no different than a training session), it’s time to get into the ring.

There is a persistent problem with all fighting games, and Undisputed carries on the tradition. Every AI boxer you face, without exception, is cheating. They have an impossible stack of stats, including nearly infinite stamina, stamina recovery, and health. No matter how well you’ve trained, no matter how good your fight camp, no matter how high your stats, you’ll be coming into the ring at a disadvantage as the AI with lesser stats than you have will somehow have better results. Their bars (health, stamina, block recovery, swelling, etc.) refills faster, they magically recover more in the corner, and at the end of the fight, they’ll be at 85% overall stamina while you’ll be sucking wind. You’ll almost never reduce somebody’s health to zero before they’re unconscious, so the bar is rather pointless. The same goes for stamina – even the Sterno bums you face in the beginning of the game have almost unlimited stamina. Even legendary Professional Scumbag Don King wouldn’t allow a fighter to enter the ring who couldn’t throw three jabs in a row without having to sit on a stool to catch their breath, but there’s plenty of that going on here.

I did mention that you hire a cutman for your corner. While there’s no minigame, or even an appearance by this person to actually do their job, they do address your cuts in between rounds. Other than taking more damage on that particular body part location, I’ve not seen it have an effect as, again, you’re usually unconscious (or they are) before it matters, but the tutorial tells me that after you receive enough cuts the fight could be stopped. I have yet to see a stoppage, either for eye swelling, or for a gash that you could drive a ‘73 Buick Riviera through. Fighters with both eyes completely swollen shut and cuts so deep on each side that you could practically see the bone will cause the ring judge to stop the fight to check, but they don’t seem to ever stop the fight. Maybe there’s a way to trigger it, but I’ve yet to see it. Besides, that’s why we have fight doctors – the ring ref isn’t the guy to make that call, because clearly he sucks at it.

I wish I could say that addresses all the cuts, but there are some technical issues that are very present in the pre-launch code I’m playing for review. More than once I’ve been stuck behind an infinite loading screen. Loading a career, switching screens to view my results of a fight, setting up my next fight. Every time I have to load I cross my fingers and hope it works. At the time of writing, I’ve restarted my career twice, losing over 9 hours of career progress as the game just won’t load my fighter any longer – sorry “Tiny”.

I ran into a bug that had me scratching my head for more than 10 hours. I thought there was no voice in the game at all beyond the music and the center judge who always announces “What I say, you must obey” before sending you to your corner. It turns out, that was a bug and there are color commentators. Sure, most of the time (and as is tradition with ALL fighting games, AAA or otherwise) they have no idea what they’re on about half the time, but they ARE there.

While it’s not a bug, I never felt like I could trap somebody against the ropes or in the corner. It’s very easy to rotate out and circle away from my incoming assault, or just back up continuously while they recover, and my opponents do both frequently. When I do this, my stamina and health meters recover slowly – something that doesn’t seem to be much of a problem for the other side. A nice stepping jab snapped to the dome would stop this in the real world, but even Roy Jones Jr. and his long arms can’t reach. The biggest offender, however, seems to be uppercuts.

Some licensed fighters have uppercuts that seem to reach half way across the ring. My fighter has stubbly little T-Rex arms and I can’t seem to connect that often. This is exacerbated by the stamina issue, so by the time you do connect it might be with the first of a thousand Q-tips gently whispering across my opponent’s chin. With the movement system, I can see slipping a punch and returning a solid uppercut, but it just doesn’t quite work the way it should. Fixable? You bet. But at launch it still feels like in over 10 hours I have yet to connect a solid uppercut.

Outside of the career and instant action you also have Prize Fights. These are challenges that rotate, and you only have one shot at them as the results end up on the online leaderboard, so bring your best. You also have the online mode. I ventured online a few times, and it seems to work fine. There was a “bad connection” icon on the top of my screen the entire time in every match I played, but I can’t say that I saw any rubber banding or phantom strikes. Like Call of Duty, you can use your upgrades to dress up your card with icons, backgrounds, and the like – helps you see at a glance what sort of play time your opponent might have.

I know it sounds like I’m down on Undisputed quite a bit here, but there’s also a lot to like. Using the instant fight mode you can set up some crazy matchups like Muhammad Ali at 216 and Eddie Hall at 300 pounds. Can the greatest of all time beat The Beast at his heaviest? Only one way to find out.

The movement in Undisputed is some of the best I’ve seen. You can move with a slow movement style, stalking your fighter slowly inching forward, but tapping up on the D-pad will switch to a “loose” style that’s more akin to Roy Jones Jr’s movements, up on the toes and quick. Undisputed is also the only game I’ve ever felt like I’m able to properly slip a punch (where you slightly move your head to the side, letting the punch “slip” by). Subtle close up movements are fantastic, mostly. Punches that deflect off of a glove end up looking very awkward, and the clinch looks entirely too weird, but the foot movement, small movements to dodge a punch, feints, and body sway look like they could have been pulled right from fight footage. Seeing a shovel hook look like they hurt, and the body ripples realistically. The licensed fighters that have unique movement styles are mapped perfectly as well, and if you use those moves effectively, you can take apart regular fighters (e.g. Ali’s right cross decimates an opponent, as does a body shot from Canelo Alvarez).

Ultimately, the biggest black eye for Undisputed is that it’s almost there. The movement is fantastic, but the stats are unbalanced. The licensed characters look great, but everyone else is a strange plastic golem. The engine to make the career path exciting is there, but there’s a gaping hole where your own skill in the equation would matter. You can fight behind a jab, but if you drop too low on your stamina, your opponent can drop you with a breeze. Faces get swollen and cut, but then it doesn’t seem to matter. Undisputed is the very definition of a draw – there’s enough positive here to give you an idea of what’s possible, but also as much not working quite how it should that it makes it tough to ignore.

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