The great thing about the sport of boxing is that you can overload it with clichés and no-one will ever complain.
Fight Night Champion
From: EA Sports
For: Xbox 360, PS3
Gritty contenders, shady promoters, dodgy judges, glamorous women ... the sport has it all, and so does the latest boxing game.
Fight Night is now a well-established series, and comfortably the heavyweight gaming champion of the sweet science.
Fight Night 4 was out a couple of years ago, and with its deep roster of authentic stars, its addictive levelling-up gameplay and its unique analog stick controls, it set the standard extremely high.
That has forced EA Sports to think outside the squared circle for Champion, and the results are intriguing.
For a start, it's the first pure sports game I've seen that is recommended for mature eyes only.
And it's just as well. Some of the early cinematics are extremely brutal, and take place not in the boxing ring but inside prison.
Yes, reaching deeper into the cliché bag, Champion features a new story mode that tracks a young fighter called Andre Bishop who (gasp) ends up in a fight he didn't pick and (gasp) ends up on the slammer.
If you can deal with the stereotypes and the rather unpleasantly violent scenes, the new mode offers a well-paced structure and a reasonably fresh take on the boxing genre.
The scenes provide some real boxing atmosphere, there is a pleasant difficulty curve, there are cuts to ESPN-authentic "news" segments, and fresh challenges break up the journey nicely.
Bishop's story is over far too quickly ... well, that's what I was going to write. Then along came the most hideously difficult sports event in the history of gaming.
Seriously, the final fight in-story mode is absolutely brutal. I haven't won it yet, and I believe I never will.
Full credit to those who have the skill and patience to get past the final opponent.
Fight Night Champion retains the familiar "legacy" mode in which you create your own fighter and guide him from the bottom rung of the sport to the top, upskilling by training along the way.
There are also plenty of authentic boxers to control, including the great Manny Pacquiao, the greatest Muhammad Ali, the Klitschkos, both Sugar Rays, Foreman and Frazier and Duran and De La Hoya and even Anthony "The Man" Mundine.
The developers have tinkered a little with the controls, and I don't know if I'm delighted about that.
They obviously felt the system in Fight Night 4 - where the right stick controlled all punches and their severity - was a bit complicated.
Now the right stick is used more for "flicking" certain punches, while a shoulder button can be used (sparingly) for the big blasts.
Face buttons can still be used for uppercuts, jabs and the like, but it feels much more fluid using the double-stick combination.
I don't know if Champion is a massive upgrade on Fight Night 4, but story mode certainly gives it a point of difference.
