	Don King Presents: Prizefighter Boxing
	Developer: Venon Games Publisher: 2K Sports Release Date: Out Now Players: 1-2	Words By:
Almost every major sport which has been turned into a game has two franchises competing for the title, and the bigger title by and large is a big money EA title. EA rival 2K Sports’ offering to the boxing arena is Don King Presents: Prizefighter. But is a big freaky afro and a lot of nonsense-shouting enough to beat EA's successful Fight Night franchise? Prizefighter starts off with all the whizzbang that'd you'd expect from a game tied to the most over-the-top man in the world. The menus zoom all over the place, tunes like 'Eye of the Tiger' are booming out and Don King is rambling along in the background about 'greatness'. This style is translated fairly well to the fights, but for a DON KING fight I'd want screaming crowds, cameos from high-price singers and the boxers parachuting from the ceiling into a paddling pool full of sharks in the ring... well maybe not quite that OTT. Alas, things are a bit more subdued and the atmosphere really never feels like a heavyweight championship fight at Madison Square Garden. The graphics are pleasing but not amazing. Fighters look stocky or wiry and despite the massive customisation options given to you they all look like generic meatheads. There are a couple of nice effects, like the sweat that accumulates as the fight goes on and the slo-mo effects after a KO but both have been mastered by Fight Night before this, so it's nothing new. And the ladies who carry around the Round boards don't even have jiggly mammaries. Boo. The sound is quite variable. The music has loads of variation for all tastes, from rock to rap and electronica, and the entrance music is satisfying. However every punch has the same dull 'thud', no matter how hard it connects and with what. A nice crunch now and then, like when you uppercut to the jaw, would have been nice. Also, your opponents' trainers are all voiced by two guys no matter how they look, and spout off the same three quasi-inspirational/riding-his-ass lines to your opponent, depending on whether you won the round or not. Style aside, let's look at the substance. The main meat of the game is the career mode, which follows the career of heavyweight great 'the kid' (that's you) from humble origins to greatness. This does sound painfully familiar and has been done many times, from tennis games to the Tony Hawks series. However, Don King presents: Prizefighter has a little ace up its sleeve-Don King. While you fight your way up from the bottom you're treated to snippets of a fake documentary called 'boxing legends'. In the short clips you're treated to quickly-cut soundbites from former heavyweight boxers and fake trainers/ex girlfriends about how much potential you had and how much you wanted to win. But the highlight has to be the King himself, who from his 'office' crammed with so many US flags you'd think it was the oval office launches into confusing rants and it's hard to tell whether he's bigging you up, or himself. Although it's not massively important, it does add a novelty factor which stops you from getting so frustrated when you actually play the game. The gameplay isn't half as innovative or exciting than advertised and generally falls flat on its face. Punches are still mapped to the face buttons, rather than the right analogue stick like Fight Night, with the right trigger moving shots to the body and pressing two face buttons uppercuts. Combine this with the right bumper for sidestep shots, the left trigger for dodging and the right analogue stick to bring the gloves up and it’s quite confusing. For the first few minutes you'll be blocking when you want to uppercut, dodging when you want to body shot and so forth. The controls are far from intuitive, but with practice you will get the hang of them, and it becomes easier to make your fighter do what you want him to do. When it comes to actually fighting things are much simpler than the controls make out - you go for the body when your opponent is guarding their face and vice-versa, with the same tactic for defence. You have a stamina bar which decreases as you throw punches, meaning that you need to pace yourself and also watch for when your opponent has worn himself out, which is a perfect time for a counter-attack. As you gain momentum in landing punches your adrenaline bar fills, which enables you to throw 'signature punches', which do more damage. Your energy bar is 2-dimensional. It goes down as you take hits and if you reach the bottom you're KO'd and need to bash the ‘A’ button to get back up. However, this bright red bar is only temporary health and the deep red bar below it is what really counts. The deep red bar represents total health and it goes down only after substantial/signature hits or KOs. At the end of each round the bright red bar refills, but only up to the level of the deep red bar. This makes it fairly hard to conclusively KO someone and makes what should be the simplest of things in a fighting game, the health bar, over-complicated. But this is by far not the worst part of Prizefighter. I've mentioned this some way into the review, even though it's the first thing you notice about the game, and is the MOST important thing to get right in a boxing game - collision detection. When at arm's length from your opponent it isn't too much of a problem, although sometimes arms will connect with other punching arms and cause damage. When you get close, or 'toe to toe' the whole game goes arse over tit: arms meld into each other and magically connect with jaws, punches you can see hitting the guy's face don't register, among other chaotic screw-ups. All the blocking and dodging aside it essentially turns into a button-mashing contest, made even worse by the game's sluggishness in responding to your controls. You'll see an opportunity for an uppercut only for it to vanish because the game isn't quick enough to react to your inputs. If you get excited and press a lot of combinations (as I did) your character will blindly throw punch after punch for seconds after you stopped pressing anything. In career mode you can only be a heavyweight, but after playing exhibitions as fly and middleweight the sluggishness is still there. This frustrating delay feels like having your Nan as your phone-a-friend lifeline on Millionaire and sours any enjoyment you get from the game. If you're a little annoyed with the fight controls the training minigames are a welcome distraction. You can train twice before a fight to boost attributes such as strength, agility, dexterity, stamina and suchlike. These range from shuttle runs that feel like the old Track and Field button-bashing to the skipping rope, which is like Dancing Stage, or Guitar Hero but replacing the manly guitar with a girly skipping rope. They get pretty manic if you keep combos going and are quick fun, but definitely no substitute for the main game. Don King Presents: Prizefighter tries to stuff very technical aspects into an arcade format game and it doesn't quite work. The career mode is promising and offers something very similar but with a twist. Unfortunately the poor boxing physics tarnish this and turn it into luck rather than skill game. There's a simple online and offline 2-player mode but the gameplay problems are still there, but at least it’s an equal handicap. Don King once said: “If there wasn't a Don King, you'd have to invent one”. I think in this case the world could have done without a Don King.