Fight Night Round 3

Fight Night Round 3 Review

Fight Night may be the only boxing game in the business, but the lack of competition certainly hasn't made the champ soft. The perfectly precise and intuitive Total Punch Control mechanic, cringe-inducing knockout blows, and in-depth boxer creation mode are all accounted for in the latest installment in this fighting series, Fight Night Round 3. New to the series this time around are impact punches, a reworked career mode, a customizable boxing-style feature, and an all-new first-person boxing mode exclusive to the PlayStation 3. Admittedly, most of the improvements and updates found in Round 3 are merely incremental updates over Round 2, but they're still enough to warrant stepping into the ring for another bout, just as long as you haven't already played the game on the Xbox 360.

The audio is well done in all three versions of the game. When you knock down an opponent with a slug to the mouth, you'll hear the sickening crunch of unseated teeth and snapping tendons, followed by the thick, wet sound of spit and blood flying from his mouth. The excessively gruesome effect really punctuates each knockdown, and it makes you want to avoid being on the receiving end of such a punch. The commentary is once again provided by Joe Tessitore, and while he's competent behind the mic, he isn't very exciting. He also tends to repeat himself often. It gets tiring to hear all about the "textbook boxing style" and "well-rounded skills" of your fighter half a dozen times in one fight. The music is composed entirely of hip-hop tunes, which sound good enough, but there are only a handful of songs, and they get repeated endlessly. As a result, you'll probably end up muting the music after a couple of hours of playing.

EA Sports' heavy-hitting franchise doesn't change up its approach for the third time through, but the gameplay remains as tight and enjoyable as it has always been. So while there are no surprises in store, you can expect a great game of boxing, with a fully capable single-player experience backing up a solid online multiplayer game. Most of the changes to the PlayStation 3 version of the game are hardly noticeable, but the new first-person perspective works surprisingly well and will hopefully be a standard option in all subsequent Fight Night releases. Although it doesn't drastically improve on what is already a great game, Fight Night Round 3 for the PlayStation 3 does enough to give it a slight edge, although not quite enough to make it worth another investment if you already own the Xbox 360 version.

Gamespot