#EA SPORTS UFC 4 GENRES HOW TO#

Previous UFC installments featured a system that involved mastery of a web of fatigue management, thumbstick movements, shoulder-button presses at the right moments and then a minigame that featured you chasing colored meters either a circle or a meter at the bottom of the screen if it was a joint lock. Then there's the grappling, which has long been the most elusive aspect to nail for any game and any designers since the dawn of MMA fighting games. All of this contributes to a better on-screen product both against AI and online players. With the right stick and trigger buttons, you block and move your head, which can lead to more sophisticated things like feints and head movement to create leverage for hooks and uppercuts, which is an essential skill for shorter fighters. It takes into account the nuance of actual striking: tapping to land something wide open versus throwing with intent to damage.

I learned and loved the pressure-based nature of several of the moves, so a simple tap of one of the face buttons leads to a roundhouse kick, while a hard push-down/short hold of the same button might lead to a different kind of kick. Once you do, it starts feeling more fluid, and you feel a little more like you know what you're doing. I was a little stunned by the in-print intricacy of the striking system at first, but like most striking systems, it takes a little while to learn. Once that goal was met, the session became freeform, with me being able to work on every facet of my fighter's attack - and attack I did. Each of them specialized in something, and each training session with them came with a goal that would lead to extra evolution points. That's where my gallant sparring partners came in. I decided I wanted her bread and butter to be striking, and then build up her wrestling and BJJ skills so she wouldn't be useless when someone takes her down. It was this mix of logistics and agency that gave me a sense of ownership of my fighter and how I wanted her to be built. You also have a limited number of training points to spend during each week, so it's on you if you want to spend more time sparring one week, hyping the next week, or inviting another fighter to train with you it's your call. As you train, you earn evolution points to spend on all manner of attributes that range from how hard you hit to how solid your defense on your back is. Whenever you accept fight offers, you have a set number of weeks to train yourself while also handling some of the outside stuff, like posting to social media or hyping up your fight. It's pretty standard career/franchise mode stuff, but the grind of crafting and building my fighter completely sucked me in. In my case, my path would take me through winning a couple of amateur fights, getting noticed by the UFC and fighting on 'Dana White's Contender Series' to win a UFC contract, and then working my way up.

#EA SPORTS UFC 4 GENRES HOW TO#

After that, you learn how to navigate the grind of becoming a UFC fighter. Davis sees something in you, and he recruits you to train at his gym. The mode starts with you on the amateur circuit, getting your ass handed to you by a more experienced fighter. Most of my journey took place within the Career mode, which asks you to create a fighter from scratch and build them into an elite fighter and possibly 'greatest of all time.' I liked the bits of storytelling at the start, where you link up with Coach Davis, a former UFC fighter who got into coaching after an injury shelved his fighting career. EA really could have called this game UFC 4 Everyone. UFC 4 not only understands this, but it has also made it so that even the newest, most casual fans can understand it while taking an entertaining surface tour of the MMA universe. While team sports games offer a visual cocktail of macro-viewed, controlled chaos mixed with geometrical harmony, combat sports titles must pull everything closer, so the challenges aren't only ones of harmony, but of symmetry within an intimate space. Perhaps they'd have been spared all this pain if it weren't so fun and easy to do it.Ĭombat sports games, especially ones dealing with mixed martial arts, have always felt especially tricky to execute because of the potentially untenable balance between intuitive mechanics and replicating the energy of the sport. They have been on the business end of my ever-expanding arsenal of Brazilian jiu-jitsu (BJJ) chokes - ooh, let's try the 'Peruvian necktie' - all for the cause of helping me craft my fighter into one of the greatest performers within the Octagon. Their limbs have been bent into unfamiliar shapes. These poor souls have suffered every method of fistic torture imaginable. I feel terrible for my UFC 4 training partners.

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