Fight Night Round 4 Review

BY Rabie Hassoun | POSTED: 29 July 2009

EA Sport\'s boxer gives a good punch for the money.



Friday Night Fight Round 3 was the best Boxing game ever released on any videogame console. The graphics were unbelievable, the gameplay was engaging and the presentation was just perfect. Rarely do people go out and buy a new console just for a sports game, but that is exactly what that game did a few years ago. The title was one of the few sports games to go platinum as well. So if anything, pressure on the next game in the series is huge. EA Sports however avoided the trap of releasing Round 4 a year later. Instead you can tell the developers used all this time to figure out what they did wrong the last time around and fix precisely that.



The two finest things about Round 3 were the presentation and graphics. Graphically, the game was just what people wanted all the next generation games to look like. Fight Night Round 4 is no different. The graphics are straight up jaw dropping and will actually have you stand up to make sure all the action in your screen is not real. While Round 3 suffered from some hiccups, round 4 runs at a comfy 60 FPS. So the game runs as smoothly as possible. What makes the graphics even better in Round 4 is the new physics system. The game plays out utterly realistic. Punch your opponent in a certain direction and watch as his body receives the blow and move in a certain way, pay some more attention to see the skin ripple across his body. All of this, plus the fantastically done character designs make this game one hell of a graphical masterpiece.

Speaking of characters design, you will be able to upload your own face into this one.  Watching your face getting beat up soaking in blood as you sit in the comfort of your living room is absolutely priceless.

Alright, so the graphics is amazing. How about the presentation this time around? Again the game nails this department down. Everything about this game’s presentation screams realism. The way the boxers enter the arena and ring is epic. If that was not enough, the game menus are very well done and are very easy to navigate. The menus might get slightly complicated in the career mode, but you will get used to them in no time.

Gameplay wise, little have changed. The game still features the fantastic gameplay engine from Round 3 so there is nothing to worry about here. A few noticeable changes are the corner healing and counterattacks. Counter moves now are very important. Avoiding a punch and countering it correctly will win you a load of matches and points. Only problem here is trying to execute those punches VS the AI. This might prove to be nearly impossible on some high difficulties as the AI will predict your every move. Healing in the corner, the other noticeable new feature, gives you points based on how well you perform in the ring. Based on how many points you are granted, you will be able to heal your Boxer.



The mode you will spend most of your time with is the career mode. As some of you sports fans have come to expect, career mode features a calendar with some important dates scattered all over it. Round 4 is no different. You have a calendar which you can use to pick or plan an event across the year.  Most of your time here will be spent either fighting or training. While the fighting is a whole lot of fun, the training mini games are defiantly not. You will have to go through some tedious and repetitive moves to improve your own character over and over again. The best thing you can do here is let the AI do this task for you.

The major issues with the career mode in this game are the awards given at the end of the season and the limited options you have. Limited options come in the shape of the game not allowing you to hire your own trainer or promoter. Sure, this is not a big deal and will surely not affect the gameplay experience, but having such options is crucial in sports games these days. At the end of each season, the game will award different boxers some awards. Believe it or not, most of those awards are given out randomly. An unbeaten rookie can finish the season with zero awards while someone with 5 defeats cans end up with one or two awards to keep. Again, not something that will hurt the overall experience, but we would have appreciated an award or two for our troubles over the whole season.

We already mentioned and praised the graphics enough, now it’s time to find out how good the game sounds. The sound department might not be good enough to knock out the graphics here, but it still gets the job done. The punches sound ultra realistic and the commentary managed to keep us entertained during every match we played. You might come across a few glitches were the sound effect doesn’t play on time, but that rarely happens overall.



Fight Night Round 4 is what all sports games should be like. It takes the whole sport of boxing and manages to put it into one fantastically done videogame. The graphics, gameplay and presentation here are perfectly done. While the AI might get frustrating at times, playing this game with some friends will surely make up for that. Everything else is just fine and this game will keep you coming back for more and more for quite some time. One thing to point out however is that this game have surely benefited from not being rushed and released a year after Round 3. At the end of the day, sports games fan or not, get out and knock your wallet out buying this one.