The Fight

Welcome to the dark and gritty world of The Fight, one of the first few Playstation 3 games to feature the console’s new Move controller. Or in this case, Move controllers, as the game is played by holding one in each hand.

In classic fighting game style, you create your character, give him the nose, hair, and stat points you want, and send him off to compete in a series of fights and tournaments to become the top fighter. The character customisation was pretty good, but there was no way of making my character anything like as fat as me. The closest I could get was Ed Norton from Fight Club skinny – and that’s a long way away from the real me.

The game has very dark and gritty graphics, with booming rap music and Danny Trejo introducing the game and demonstrating the tutorial. Basically, it tries way too hard to be “street” – like your Nan at a disco trying to breakdance. It doesn’t really work, but at the end of the day, it is a game about punching other people in the face, so if that works, then it doesn’t matter how “urban” it is.

To the fighting, then. Positioning yourself in front of your Playstation Eye camera, you arm yourself with a Move controller in each hand, and then perform the calibration moves. First, the Jesus (arms outstretched at shoulder height), followed by the Jordan (arms tight across your chest, with the two balls atop the move controller resting on your chin). This has to be done before every fight, which seems a little bit annoying, but is justified as you are bound to move around a little during fighting, which is something the game tells you not to do.

I found the camera/controllers combination did a wonderful job of tracking my arms, and when I swung a punch you could really see how I had done it – big roundhouse punches, uppercuts and jabs were all tracked accurately, with both fists. I managed to get into a wonderful position of battering my on screen enemy’s head alternately with left and right roundhouses so hard that I thought his head might snap clean off. On the topic of heads, the game also features head tracking so as you move your head around, it is supposed to move your fighter’s head to match. My room is very dimly lit, and directly behind me was a cluttered bookshelf, so this feature refused to work. Reading around the internet, this is a common problem even in well lit rooms, so if you get this, don’t rely on that working.

One of the odd things about the game is the way that the game levels up your fighter. You have skill points and stamina, so even if you (the player) are a world champion boxer you won’t necessarily mop the floor with everyone, as your on-screen character needs to guard and recover stamina from time to time. Personally, I found it an excellent time to rest and try to stop myself having a coronary from all the exertion.

Ah, the exertion. One of the reasons I got so tired too quickly was that I found I was really immersed in the fight itself. I was genuinely swinging big, hard punches to try and knock the other guy down, and that is seriously hard work. I was less enamoured (and even more knackered) by the Gym mini-games, where you hit bags, speedballs and sparring partners to earn extra points for your fighter. They were okay, and again, accurate, but I found them a lot less fun than the real fights.