Undisputed Final Preview: Calling All Fight Night Fans

ign.com:

While boxing has never been my favorite sport, I can't tell you how many hours I put into the Fight Night series back in the 2000s. The combination of realism and focus on presentation lived up to EA Sports' motto of making you feel like you're in the game. Despite my nostalgia for that franchise, it only took an hour-long preview of Undisputed at PAX West to realize that the boxing video game genre has a new contender on the horizon.

I jumped right into my Undisputed preview by challenging Steel City Interactive CEO and Co-Founder Ash Habib to a sparring match. In reality, it was more of a tutorial, as he ran through all the basics of the mechanics while explaining how and why they were put into the game. It only took until the character selection screen for me to get my first rush of excitement with Undisputed. It’s sporting a huge roster of notable boxing stars past and present, including Mike Tyson, Katie Taylor, and Eddie Hall.

You read that right; you can even play as one of the World's Strongest Men. Naturally, I had to go with Hall as soon as I saw him, even if it was a slight mismatch against Habib's choice of Muhammad Ali. Despite the disadvantage, I was confident that my history with Fight Night would serve me well. Ali might be the greatest of all time, but Hall is an absolute monster of a man. It didn't take long into the fight to show how wrong I was.

At first, the gameplay felt very similar to what I was used to, thanks to my previous experience with boxing games. It wasn't long before I felt comfortable dodging, jabbing, and throwing power punches in rhythm with my opponent's movements. As the fight continued, I began to see small gameplay features that emphasized how important it was to the development team to make matches feel as true to life as possible. Every detail matters in Undisputed, from how characters move to their size and attributes, with each giving way to a certain strategy that changes how you can approach each fight.

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