When we met UFC 2009: Undisputed, UFC was a sport and organisation on the way up. That continued afterwards, with a merger with rival series World Extreme Cagefighting in 2010 and further increases in viewership. Changes were coming in 2012, when women would be allowed to be part of it for the first time. For the UK, a long-term broadcast deal with BT Sport would follow, bringing it to a wider audience in a more stable way than the previous assortment of channels including the ill-fated Setanta. Although this absence doesn’t seem to have hurt the popularity of its video games here. For those games change was coming too, with UFC ending its contract with THQ in 2012.
UFC Undisputed 3 was therefore a UFC swansong for not just publishers THQ but developers Yuke’s. There is a tangible air of celebration and history present, particularly in including for the first time MMA events from the defunct Japanese promoter Pride. That’s a neat way of signing off for a developer who got their start on games based on Japanese pro-wrestling. It doesn’t mean that much to me as someone who never watched Pride or UFC, but I can imagine equivalencies from other sports to think that it’s cool to have a wider view on history.
It is visibly a game made for enthusiastic UFC fans. And while its octagon fighting arenas come marked up with their locations in Madison Square Garden or The O2 Arena, it isn’t a sense of being there that it’s trying to get across, of course. It’s the feeling of watching it on TV, complete with commentary and with little bits like the tale of the tape being introduced with tags for its sponsors, from energy drinks to some kind of mysterious world combat organisation. The commerciality is naked, but no more so than the average FIFA game.
More so than the first UFC Undisputed, it’s also a game which makes easy sense to play outside of that context. By being less finicky about stamina, it’s more reasonable to play without meters cluttering up the view and to focus on the flow of the fight. It finesses the various interlocking systems for that further, so that transitioning in and out of various situations becomes easy to learn. I felt much more like I was really developing and applying a strategy, and it worked through a series of fights as I rose up the rankings before eventually stopping working quite well enough.
That strategy was mostly trying to take opponents to the mat to wear down time, keep away from them as much as possible otherwise, and then hit them with the biggest attacks I could do. Undisputed 3’s special moves are simple to do and not overpowered, but feel special nonetheless. Partly this is by nature. The title screen has a bloke getting spectacularly kicked in the face, and the game allows you to hold down LT and press B and deliver a spinning roundhouse kick to the face while commentators whoop appreciatively. It just fits.
The satisfying sense of impact is also quite a feat of animation though, something which the game is impressively hot on in general. Especially considering how many ways its fighters can end up writhing on the mat and gripping each other tightly. Even in close up clinch, there are very rarely moments when they don’t seem like two people each moving smoothly and interacting with each other. Achieving that already felt like a bit of a magic trick in Uncharted 2, when it was only being done in scripted scenes.
As an outsider, at least, that sense of mastery goes through the whole game. A trilogy can be a good length to work up to the best version of something, and it seems that what Yuke’s had done. Then they got the chance to get out of there before having to work out how to keep turning it into updates in the way that can make any sport suffer. Speaking of which, there is a certain inevitability in where the contract went next, paralleling UFC’s own series of takeovers. When I next get to a UFC game, it will be as part of EA’s inexorable gobbling up of every popular sports brand.
Top of the charts for week ending 18 February 2012:
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