Ronda Rousey and Conor McGregor’s starring roles on the cover of EA Sports’ latest attempt at recreating the world of the Ultimate Fighting Championship is fitting. These are two of the sport’s most renowned stars; blessed with the precision, dedication and desire required to lift them to championship glory. Yet in their latest respective fights they both lost to opponents most expected them to beat. They’ve got the moves and the talent, but in the vital moment they failed to improvise and fell apart. EA Sports UFC 2 is no different.
The real UFC is full of sentimental, if brutal, glory. An underdog can get lucky and beat the champion with the first strike of a bout. The most enduring star can win in a way that no one has ever seen before, furthering strengthening their legend. Ronda Rousey beat Cat Zingano in 14 seconds using a combination of dodge, counterattack and submission that most would think impossible. Such moments of shock and awe don’t happen here. UFC 2 is too sterile, too rigid, and too predictable to ever feel like a genuine representation of a sport that has built a dedicated audience thanks in large part to the reality that anything can happen at any moment.
Of course, replicating this most fundamental aspect of sport is no easy feat for any video game – particularly one that must simultaneously offer both balance for casual players and hardcore simulation. It’s reasonable to expect to be able to tangle with one another and have the superior, more skilled player coming out on top. Having the more skilled competitor being defeated by the first strike landed against them (whether that’s in the first round or the third) simply wouldn’t be fair in terms of game balance.
So instead of attempting to be a genuine recreation of the UFC, then, developer EA Canada’s approach is to provide an accurate representation of mixed martial arts’ core mechanics within a visual wrapper that is impressive to behold. In this regard, UFC 2 can be considered a success.
This is one of the most visually impactful sports games ever made.
Likewise, without question this is one of the most visually impactful sports games ever made, competing with NBA 2K when it comes to athlete likenesses and FIFA in terms of animation variety. Every tattoo adorning McGregor appears to be within a single pixel of accuracy, every one of Rousey’s tightly packed upper-body muscles flexes powerfully as each jab is thrown. Combine this with the sheer variety of attacks at your disposal and it was nearly impossible to not be impressed by the visual spectacle even after hours of play under my belt.
Throw a punch during this momentary disconnect with reality and you’re treated to seeing a professional fighter look like a drunk.
Awkward moments are thrown up, as they were in EA Sports’ 2014 UFC release, when a fighter’s position is quickly and dramatically altered. This is particularly noticeable after you’ve just dropped your foe to the canvas with a solid strike, it Takes a second for your fighter to register that the target is no longer standing right in front of them. Throw a punch during this momentary disconnect with reality and you’re treated to seeing a professional fighter look like a drunk as they harmlessly swat away at the air in front of their face.
Otherwise, the animations have been masterfully constructed in a manner that allows you total control over individual actions. It’s when you’re on your feet that things are at their most powerful; the best strikers able to execute combos as fast and as accurately as you can input them. Softening up your opponent with a few leg kicks before peppering the head and body with punches is an art unto itself and, as long as you pit yourself against quality opposition, one that takes significant practise to execute flawlessly.
Take the fight to ground with a wrestling or Brazilian jujitsu specialist, however, and the action is less impressive. Transitioning between positions of varying levels of dominance is assigned to the right stick, as it was in the 2014 UFC, with the ‘full mount’ position tending to represent the hallowed ground from which fights are generally won. Welcomingly, when the fight hits the mat a small icon appears indicating which position each stick movement will seek to secure. This takes away the boorish memorisation that was needed in the past and allows you to concentrate solely on outwitting your opponent and manipulating their body in such a way as to make defence difficult.
However, while the mechanics are well thought out in isolation, the end result is simply too strict and controlled to allow free-flowing combat. In reality, the best ground fighters move seamlessly, and often unpredictably, in an attempt to catch their opposite number off guard. The likes of Chris Weidman and Fabricio Werdum are, in reality, able to interlock a number of skills into a single motion that leaves both spectator and opponent confused – that doesn’t happen here. Once the best sequence of position changes has been found with a specific fighting style it becomes a matter of repeating that consistently in order to notch up victory after victory against the AI.
Game modes perfectly reflect this predictability; the usual slate of career mode, quick fights and online ladders standing front and centre. Career mode is especially underwhelming, as you must undertake simple training mini-games in a bid to improve your fighter and win matches to move towards a title shot. It’s entirely perfunctory, nothing more.
The most attention-grabbing new edition is Ultimate Team, an attempt to replicate the success EA Sports has seen through offering digital cards throughout the likes of FIFA and Madden. Here you can create a team of up to five custom-built fighters and compete with them, online or off, with a view to winning fights and collecting points that can be redeemed for packs of cards.
Spending points to acquire a new type of punch is less exciting.
These cards unlock new attacks, fighting styles and stat boosts of varying levels of impact, which means that in comparison to Ultimate Team as seen in FIFA and Madden, the implementation here is underwhelming. There’s little wrong with the underlying concept of adding a slight random element to career progression through not knowing what a pack might hold, but spending points to acquire a new type of punch is less exciting than ripping open a pack to find a playable Odell Beckham Jr. or Lionel Messi. Locking out fighters wasn’t going to work in this sport, given the comparatively smaller number of names featured here in comparison to team sport games, but withholding a punch from you until you’ve bought it rather than allowing you to earn it through training feels cynical and forced.
That is UFC 2’s problem throughout: the fundamentals are right, but the spectacle and details that might have made it feel like the real thing are missing. The stand-up game might be technically brilliant, and the visuals genuinely eye catching, but it never lets itself go and allows its fists to fly. Everything is too structured, too robotic and, after 20 or 30 bouts, too predictable to tease you into suspending your disbelief and making you feel as though you’re a UFC competitor.
Ultimately, then, this is perhaps the best example yet of how difficult it is to simulate certain real-world activities within a video game. If UFC 2 really did try to ‘be’ the UFC then it would fail in terms a balanced fighting experience, so you could argue that it’s simulation attempt is doomed from the start. That’s not to say that actual UFC fights are random in their outcome, but there certainly does exist a constant potential for surprise within them. That surprise, and the excitement it generates, is what’s missing here.
While UFC 2 certainly looks the part, it doesn’t feel it. Strikes are razor sharp, kicks are satisfyingly heavy, and each and every fighter is beautifully sculpted and recreated, but each and every element is too robotic and rigid to recreate the dynamism and unpredictability that draws me to real UFC fights. Those fights are often won by finding those spaces between the lines that your opponent hasn’t thought to cover, but those spaces simply don’t exist here. As a fighting game it’s worth your time if you’re seeking something other than the usual options, but as a recreation of the UFC it falters before the final bell.
