Ultimate Fighting Championship Review

For Dreamcast

Rating: Good
Ultimate Fighting Championship is a fundamentally strong game that isn't
quite good enough to be fun for more than a few days. Those few days are
action-packed and thrilling to say the least, but when the shine begins to
wear off, an unbalanced game is revealed underneath.
UFC offers a greater sense of realism than most fighting games because
it's based on a real fighting league. All of the characters are
legitimately tough, mean-looking guys rather than outlandish personalities.
The animations for punches and kicks make them seem really solid,
particularly the animation for a knock-out blow.
The no-holds-barred rules allow you to fight in both a standing position
and on the ground. There's a lot of strategy involved in the decisions that
you have to constantly make. Do you stay on your feet and try to take your
opponent down with well-placed punches and kicks? Do you take your opponent
to the ground and pound on them from above or try to make them submit?
These strategic choices give the game a lot of variety and allow you to make
every fight as repetitive or unique as you want it to be.
The presentation of the game adds a lot to the experience and makes you
feel excited about fights that might otherwise seem trivial. The music is
fitting, the graphics are extremely impressive, the entrances add a lot of
atmosphere, and the different-sized fighters are proportioned just right.
The fight highlights in between rounds also add to the game, although they
seem to be nothing more than random snippets of action rather than the
actual pivotal moments of the round.
After you look past the stellar presentation and the basic concepts
behind the game, you'll find that the gameplay itself isn't as polished as
it should be. As realistic as the game feels, it would be even better if
the element of blood wasn't handed so poorly. Landing strong punches causes
tiny droplets of blood to splatter unrealistically and then disappear. UFC
would be a much better game with a Ready 2 Rumble-style system of showing
damage to the fighters' faces in order to get across the brutality of the
fights.
The ground-based fighting system could have been the game's biggest
strength, but it turns out to be its biggest weakness. Submission moves can
happen in the blink of an eye at any time, which makes the game as a whole
feel very cheap. Like most unbalanced games, it's frustrating when you lose
and it's not satisfying when you win.
When your opponent is on top of you pounding away, there's not a whole
lot you can do about it. Trying to punch back from your precarious position
is a suicide move that will lead to your unconsciousness within ten seconds.
Due to the overly-sensitive control of having to press two buttons at once
for reversals, it's pretty much dumb luck whether you're able to execute a
counter and flip your opponent over.
UFC initially seems to be one of the freshest and most unique fighting
games released in a long time. After a while, though, the flaws of the
ground-based fighting system add up to encourage you to simply stay on your
feet as much as possible. When you've reached that point, Ultimate Fighting
Championship is just like any other fighting game.

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