Don King Presents: Prizefighter

Rating Teen Genre sports Publisher 2K Sports External Links Official Prizefighter Website

There aren’t too many boxing titles out for the 360 and the Fight Night series currently stands as the reigning champion. It’s always good to have competition though and Don King Presents: Prizefighter is looking to fill that role. It’s an unusual review for me since I’m probably one of the few who hasn’t played any of the Fight Night games, so I came into Prizefighter with no preconceived notions of what it should be. On the other hand, I’m not a great fan of Don King and I’m really not that into fighting games, so Prizefighter had its own hills to climb to get by me. In the end, it’s a fun game. It is certainly flawed in many areas, but the overall experience is at least entertaining.

The main draw is in the career mode and this is where Prizefighter scores most of its high marks. Right off the bat you enter into a documentary chronicling your origins as a fighter. It’s pretty well done, if a little cheesy in spots, but it helps set the scene and bring another level to career mode. There are video interviews with various boxing names, models who are supposed to be ex-girlfriends, and even Mario Van Peebles who is apparently a boxing biographer now. The documentary continues throughout the game and progresses along with your rise through the boxing ranks. After the intro you enter the fighter creation screen. Here you can get as detailed as you like in setting just about every attribute you can think of. It’s very thorough except that you are forced into being a heavyweight and you have to use the nickname “The Kid”. I know this was done to fit the documentary references, but it’s a little unfortunate to be limited in these areas when you can control so many other things.

Now that you’re created and introduced your fighter, it’s finally time to enter the ring. This is where Prizefighter started to stumble for me. Obviously, gameplay is critical in any game, but especially so for a sports simulation. As you begin, you get a quick training session that runs through the controls. After a cursory glance at the controls page in the manual, I began to get a little worried. All of your punches are mapped to the face buttons. From there, you can modify them by various combinations of the triggers, bumpers, and I think even the lighting in your room. As an example, the X button throws a jab to the head, but if you hold the right trigger while pressing X, it becomes a body jab. Think through all the possible combinations of all the buttons and you can see that there is a lot to learn to get the controls down.

After a few fights I started to get the hang of the controls much better than I thought I would. At times it still feels somewhat like a button mash. Almost every sports title has incorporated the right stick with great success to add realism. 2K is a prime example of this with the Total Control schemes they used in MLB 2K8. After reading up I found that Fight Night uses the right stick for almost everything, so maybe this is why they departed from it for Prizefighter, but I don’t think it was a good move. To give an example of how absurd it can get, the control to throw a step around right body hook requires you to press RB, RT, hold the left stick down, and press B all at the same time. Needless to say this is not easy in the middle of a fight while you’re trying to avoid getting hit. Despite somewhat clunky controls, I was able to at least be functional with practice. Fortunately it doesn’t seem to be necessary to use a lot of the more complex punches to be successful, so I was able to get wins by keeping it simple and mixing in a few big punches that I‘d pinned down. As the wins rack up, your career progression moves right along with it.

The first fights are set in dingy gyms with maybe a handful of people watching. The more you win the nicer places you get to fight in and you’ll also draw bigger crowds. Eventually you get to the shrines of boxing such as the Taj Mahal or Madison Square Garden. To get that far you have to build your fighter, which is another neat aspect of Prizefighter. When you book a fight you get a few weeks set aside for training. There are five training activities to choose from that will build your fighter attributes in different ways. Each activity is a mini-game and some are very fun. As an example, the speed bag exercise sort of plays like Guitar Hero on crack. You must hit the face buttons in time as they fly into the center of the screen. The more you hit in a row, the faster they come. The better your score in these mini-games, the more attribute points you gain.

Other than the control scheme, there are some well noted flaws in the graphics and the collision detection. I’ve definitely run into some clipping problems. Also, and this has happened several times, either my punches didn’t respond or more punches were thrown than I wanted. Overall, I don’t think these issues were devastating. At the end of day a game needs to be fun to be worth the invested time and cost. Prizefighter fits that bill. It’s not a perfect boxing game, but it gets a lot of things right and makes for an entertaining play. The control scheme is really the biggest problem, but once you learn it, you‘ll be fine. I sure would love to see the right stick brought into play for the sequel though.