Greetings and salutations to you all and welcome back to my little corner of the T4 website. This week’s review will be on yet another THQ release, UFC Undisputed 3. You can find it on the Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3 for about $50-$60 brand new. Do keep in mind that if you buy this game used and plan to play online or use any of the online features, that will be another $10 as this game has an online pass. Much like other THQ releases, there is also a season pass which you can purchase. It’s $16.99 for nearly all of the DLC and future DLC (listed below). The only things that are not included are the $3 “Create-a-Fighter Boost” which gives you extra points to use in your non-career create-a-fighter. Supposedly saves about 8-10 hours of gameplay. And the “Contenders Pack” which was an exclusive EB/Gamestop pre-order exclusive. Don’t quote me on it, but the Contenders pack will probably be available to everyone in May or June, as most pre-order exclusives wind up on the store/marketplace 90 days after the game’s release. Here’s the rest of the DLC that has been released or scheduled to be released.
Fighter Packs
Fight of the Night Pack: Joe Lauzon, Rory MacDonald, Charles Oliveira and Sam Stout, and Anthony Johnson . MSRP is 400 Microsoft Points for Xbox 360 or $4.99 USD via PlayStation Network in March 2012.
International Pack: “The Korean Zombie” Jung Chan-Sung, John Hathaway, Pascal Kraus, Kyle Noke, and Alessio Sakara. Once again, the MSRP is 400 Microsoft Points for Xbox 360 or $4.99 USD via PlayStation Network in April 2012.
Alistair Overeem: If you did not participate in “liking” the game’s Facebook page and getting Alistair Overeem for free, you can purchase him on the PSN Store for 99 cents or on the XBL Marketplace for 80 Microsoft Points.
All Unlockables: The All Unlockables offering will be available at launch for a suggested purchase cost of 160 Microsoft Points for Xbox 360 or $1.99 USD via PlayStation Network. This is actually a pretty nice purchase. There is tons of stuff to unlock, like clothing for your CAF, ring/octagon entrances for Pride and UFC, arena entrances for both organizations, call names, videos, and a few other things. Keep in mind that this does not unlock all the sponsors’ clothing and logos in Career Mode.
Ultimate Fights Collections
Ultimate Submissions: This pack is free of charge.
UFC 109: Mike Swick vs. Paulo Thiago.
UFC 115: Mirko Cro Cop vs. Pat Barry.
UFC 116: Brock Lesnar vs. Shane Carwin.
UFC Fight Night 19: Nate Diaz vs. Melvin Guillard.
UFC Fight Night 21: Kenny Florian vs. Takanori Gomi.
Ultimate Rivals: This pack is free of charge also.
UFC 92: Quinton “Rampage” Jackson vs. Wanderlei Silva.
UFC 111: Georges St-Pierre vs. Dan Hardy.
UFC 114: Quinton “Rampage” Jackson vs. Rashad Evans.
UFC 117: Anderson Silva vs. Chael Sonnen.
The Ultimate Fighter Season 9: Diego Sanchez vs. Clay Guida.
Ultimate Upsets: Scheduled to be released in March 2012. Just like the fighter packs, this is also going to be 400 Microsoft Points for Xbox 360 or $4.99 USD via PlayStation Network.
UFC 92: Frank Mir vs. Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira.
UFC 109: Chael Sonnen vs. Nate Marquardt.
UFC 112: Frankie Edgar vs. BJ Penn.
UFC 116: Chris Leben vs. Yoshihiro Akiyama.
UFC 121: Cain Velasquez vs. Brock Lesnar.
Mixed Bag: Should be released sometime in April 2012, and again the MSRP is 400 Microsoft Points for Xbox 360 or $4.99 USD via PlayStation Network.
Best of PRIDE – Final Conflict 2003: Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira vs. Mirko Cro Cop.
Submissions – UFC 125: Takanori Gomi vs. Clay Guida.
Upsets – UFC 110: Joe Stevenson vs. George Sotiropoulos.
Rivals – UFC 124: Stefan Struve vs. Sean McCorkle.
Knockouts – UFC 120: Dan Hardy vs. Carlos Condit.
As you can see, THQ has really put a lot of work into the DLC this year, and there are rumors that there might be even more around the corner. If you choose to stay away from DLC, there’s still a lot of stuff available to you within the game and unlocking everything will keep you busy. In the game’s marketplace, there are 4 fighters (Heath Herring, Dan “The Beast” Severn, Mark Coleman, and my personal favorite, “The Ice Man” Chuck Liddell), 160 articles of clothing for your Create a Fighter, 195 UFC Cutscenes (Arena entrances, Octagon entrances, and motions for when Bruce Buffer is introducing your fighter), 20 Pride cutscenes (Arena entrances, stair descents, and ring entrances), 7 taunts, 48 nicknames for your Create-A-Fighter, and finally 72 movies. That “Unlock All” DLC is looking pretty nice, huh? All of that stuff is either unlocked using in game currency which you get for winning fights (about 200 points per fight) in the various modes or by completing tasks, like completing 50 goals in the Title Defense Mode.
Speaking of modes, I should probably tell you about the game now instead of just talking all about unlockables and DLC. If you’ve played the last two UFC games for the PS3 or Xbox 360, you should have a rough idea what to expect out of this one. If you’ve never played a UFC game before, this is definitely the game to get. THQ has taken most of the complaints from the last 2 games and fixed them this year, which has made this game unreal. Most common complaints I’ve heard from past games were the difficulty of the transitions and the submission system from UFC Undisputed 2010. As far as transitions go in UFC Undisputed 3, you have a couple of options this year in control schemes. You can choose between Pro controls, which is the same scheme as the last couple of games, or the new “Amateur” controls, which instead of making half circles or quarter circles to do transitions, you know just have to move the right stick up or down. While it’s easier to do amateur controls, you’re gonna miss out on a few positions/transitions in the ground game, so you kinda gotta weigh your options. Submissions also got redone this year. In the first game, you had the option of button mashing or “shining” (rotating the right stick in circles and hope you are going the right way) to get out of submissions. In UFC Undisputed 2010, they took out button mashing and just left us with shine. This year, they’ve trashed both of those and came up with a much better and easier way to gauge your submissions. When you lock on a submission, you’ll get a pop up of an octagon and you have to use your bar and overlap your opponent’s bar. It’s pretty much a game of cat & mouse around an octagon. This new feature is a welcomed change and really lets you go for submissions, unlike the last few games, where it’s been “cross your fingers and hope for the best as you rotate the stick”.
Another new addition this year is the content sharing feature for online. You can now download created fighters, created logos, highlight reels, and event cards from your friends, THQ, or random people. While it’s a nice feature to have, one of the downsides is that the CAFs can look rather generic due to the aging/out of date CAF system. I don’t think THQ have made any drastic updates or changes to their Create a Fighter system since the first game, which came out in 2009.
The other additions to this year’s game are pretty big and figure they deserve their own little section here. UFC Undisputed 3 contains 150+ fighters spread out over 7 weight classes: the new Bantamweight and Featherweight divisions up to the massive Heavyweight division. Also, most of the divisions are split up between Pride and UFC, with the Pride fighters using their “prime” stats. What if the weight class you wanna fight with didn’t exist in Pride? That’s okay because you can take any fighter you want from Pride or UFC into Pride mode this year and fight with the Pride rules intact. Face stomps and soccer kicks anyone? You also can’t have Pride mode without the screaming lady for your intros and Bas Rutten and Stephen Quadros on commentary.
Pride Mode also takes place during the new and improved Career Mode in UFC Undisputed 3. In Career mode, you can take your Create a Fighter or any UFC or Pride fighter (new this year) and fight your way up from the WFA to the UFC and fight in the Pride Grand Prix. I wonder how many times I’ve said new so far…..When you start a career as a UFC or Pride fighter, you are starting over from scratch like you would with a created fighter, so you have the opportunity to make these fighters your own. Want Brock Lesnar to be a submission artist and use BJJ? This is the place to do it. Another great thing about Career Mode this year is how quick and streamlined it is. Unlike last year where you had anywhere between 5-12 weeks between fights, now you get 1 to 2 weeks between fights and you can use that time to work on obtaining and leveling up your moves from the 6 MMA camps (Wolfslair, Jacksons, American Top Team, Blackhouse, American Kickboxing Academy, and Sityodtong) or by working on your skills and sparring with brand new training games. This year, there are no points to assign or stat decay. If you want to be good at something, you best be training in it. Keep in mind that if you are working strictly on your takedowns or submissions, you’re gonna be losing points in the stand up department, so you really gotta think about what you are doing and the direction you want your fighter to go. Couple of quick suggestions if you do have the game and haven’t started your career yet: Your career will be 47 or 48 fights long. Around fight #15, you are going to be locked into a single fight camp, so you might wanna check out all the camps, figure out where you’re gonna want to be from fights 16 to 48 and then learn moves from the other camps between fights 1 through 15, cause once you choose your fight camp, all the other camps and their moves are locked off to you.
It’s time for the trophy rundown. For UFC Undisputed, there are 39 trophies to unlock (40 if you are on the PS3 due to the Platinum). None of them are too crazy outside of playing 500 or more ranked online fights. I’d suggest looking at the trophies/achievement list and just go one by one as if it were a checklist. A handful of them can only be done in Career mode, while the other ones are just doing certain tasks like winning a fight in Pride via KO by Soccer Kick.
Getting into the criteria….
The Good: I think I’ve pretty much laid out all the good about this game. Even re-reading this review, I don’t feel like I’ve done the game justice. There’s just so much greatness to this game that it’s hard to put into words.
The Bad: Well, then again, it can’t all be good. There’s no such thing as the perfect game when it comes to video games. Granted, some of these may seem to be nitpicking or minute, but it’s still kind of a drag. Biggest issue I have with UFC Undisputed 3 is the online servers. THQ really has dropped the ball when it comes to online play in so many of their games as of late. My last review here on the T4 Show was for WWE 12 which came out back in November and the online servers for WWE 12 are still horrible 3-4 months later. The online problems we had in UFC Undisputed 2010 have carried over to UFC Undisputed 3. An example would be fighting in an online match and once you get someone in the clinch or on the ground, you’ll be disconnected. According to THQ, this only happens 3-5% of the time, yet it happened numerous times in a row when I was trying to do ranked matches or have exhibition fights with friends. I don’t understand how this issue has not been fixed between the two games. This year, THQ had an Alpha server test on the 360 and the PS3 and had received numerous reports about various bugs that were present in this game and had shown up from the last game, yet nothing has been done to repair them. Another thing I don’t understand on THQ’s part is the lack of custom themes for this game. The WWE games have had custom themes for years now. Why not this game? I don’t wanna hear some crappy generic rock theme for my Create a Fighter or any of the real fighters. I wanna use the themes I have saved on my hard drive. I want my Create a Fighter to come out to Killswitch Engage’s “Eye of the Storm”. I want Ryan Bader to come out to the Imperial March. I want the real songs tied into the entrances. I get why they can’t put them in the game, but why close off the option to us? And yes, this is a small thing, but it adds to the realism. Does it break the game? No. But it’d be nice to have. Also, can anyone tell me why a company would take out call names that have already been recorded? Or why it is that a game like MLB The Show can have a plethora of first and last names in their name database, yet in other games, we are given less than a hundred? Why do I have to resort to being either William “Lights Out” and have no last name announced or choose a fake last name? Come on Bruce Buffer, say it with me…William Boyd…Last but not least, yet another new addition to UFC Undisputed 3 is the simulation energy/stamina system. It’s a great feature and it adds to the realism. No more 50 punch combos without gassing and so on. But what I would like in addition to that simulation energy would be a simulation clock that actually keeps real time. I hate having 5 minute training sessions that are only 2-3 minutes long in real time or running short on time because I don’t have the full 5 minutes. One of the training drills is cage control and it’ll give you the task to hold your opponent up against the cage for 5 seconds. You get him into position and hold him there for 5 seconds of real time, yet if you look at the game clock, you just spent 20-30 seconds? I get why some people wouldn’t wanna train for a full 5 minutes but it’d still be a nice option to have for those of us who do.
With all that being said, thank you for reading my review. If anything in this review caught your interest, please check out this game. Feel free to leave comments and feedback. They are greatly appreciated. If you agree with what I have written, say so. If you don’t like the game or my review, say so. If there is a certain game you’d like to see me review out of my collection, once again, just say so, and I will do the best that I can to write one up for you.
My personal video game collection: http://www.icollectmedia.com/collection/game/wboyd31/?display=
My Xbox Live Gamertag: WBoyd31
My PSN Gamertag: LonesomeRaven
