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Don King Presents: Prizefighter First Look

The greatest hype man in history now has his own videogame. Spectaculocity! by Nate Ahearn

April 14, 2008 - Let me preface this preview with saying that Don King was a recent guest on our Three Red Lights podcast and during that appearance set the bar for all celebrity audio interviews.

The man's perfect interview skills are something that Fight Night Round 3 could never rely on to hype its release back in February of 2006. Don King Presents: Prizefighter is 2K Sports' answer to EA Sports' current boxing champion, or at least that's what the developers at Venom Games (the same blokes who brought us Rocky Legends on Xbox) are hoping.

We got an early, pre-beta look at Prizefighter last week and came away with one word echoing in our heads: spectaculocity. While there's no true definition to the word that Don King uses to open the introductory cinematic to the game, we can't help but feel that it's an accurate summation for the overall tone of Prizefighter.

The core idea behind Prizefighter's career mode – something that was a bit of a bare bones effort in Fight Night Round 3 – is to deliver a documentary-style presentation that gives a retrospective look at a fighter that is supposed to be one of the sport's best. Throughout the 50 bouts that line the career mode you'll see around an hour of documentary footage. You'll hear Ken Norton rattle off a few lines about your tireless tenacity in the ring, Larry Holmes will chime in about your punching power, heck, even ex-girlfriends will show their mugs to talk about your away-from-the-ring shenanigans. From what we could tell the presentation felt authentic and worked well to push the story events forward.

Don King Presents PRIZEFIGHTER 6 Throughout your years in the ring there will be several hills to climb to ensure that your progression to the top continues on a steady course. Before some fights you'll incur injuries like breaking your hand. Your strategy will need to change in the ring to favor one side, something that will also affect how the AI tackles the bout. You'll also need to make decisions to balance the temptations of flashy media events like movie premieres and club openings with training sessions in the Fighter Factory to tune your boxing prowess. The more media functions you attend the better your public perception will be (thus your adrenaline will be higher in the fight) but your stamina will suffer.

Ouch.

Training, as it has been in basically every boxing in recent memory, is an important part of fight preparation and the gameplay as a whole. In Prizefighter the training options feature the usual offerings of hitting the speed bag, the standard punching bag and jumping rope; no word on the rest of the training mini-games. It appears that all of the activities take on a rhythm-based gameplay model that is similar to Guitar Hero and Rock Band. Face buttons flow up a stream and need to be hit at a certain time. As you'd expect, progression slows as you advance in your career and the difficulty of each training activity ratchets up.

Don King Presents PRIZEFIGHTER 7 There's no question that the career mode and its trimmings look very promising. We've never seen a boxing game try for this kind of presentation before with name athletes and Don King himself providing a look at the career of a once-great fighter. Where boxing games are cast out or crowned champions, though, is in the ring. There are 80 boxers total in the game, 40 of which are licensed with 30 of those being currently active in the sport. Your main rival is a fictional character, but that's only to allow for some custom story arcs to build throughout the course of the game.

As we said, the pure boxing action is what really makes or breaks a boxing title and is one of the main reasons why Fight Night Round 3 is still an awesomely fun and addictive game. The presentation values made you feel like you were watching a real fight with real combatants. Prizefighter isn't quite up to the level of Fight Night just yet, but there's still time for things to smooth out a bit. Our main problem was with the fluidity of the action. Some punches went through character models and none seemed to have the power or pack the "wallop" that we saw in Fight Night.

Ouch again.

The control scheme was also different than we're used to seeing. Gone are the days of punching with the right analog stick; instead that will be used solely for blocking. The face buttons take over the duty of punching with one acting as a jab, another as a hook, and a combo of both for uppercuts. There's also a sidestep-punch combination that is done by pressing a bumper, up on the left stick, and the appropriate face button. Body shots are pulled off by holding the right trigger. The developers at Venom say that their control scheme was designed to allow for more lateral movement around the ring, though we'll have to wait to get our hands on the game to see how much it actually impacts gameplay.

Don King Presents PRIZEFIGHTER 10 The presentation for Prizefighter is already running at a high level, even beyond the aforementioned career mode. The soundtrack, for instance, has a large array of tracks, including the oft-requested Eye of the Tiger. There are also 22 arenas including the likes of Madison Square Garden. Combine a heavyweight championship fight with Eye of the Tiger in Madison Square Garden and you get an instantly memorable moment by videogame standards. It also doesn't hurt that Jim Lampley and Emmanuel Stuart are providing commentary but their accuracy did need to be tuned a bit in our version.

The stare down.
The visual style is obviously inspired by the 1970s judging from its color palette and the look of the some of the player models. There are classic bouts that can be setup (like Max Baer and Jimmy Braddock from the film Cinderella Man) and Prizefighter sets a visual filter that brings the presentation back to the proper era. The facial deformation wasn't quite up to the level of Fight Night Round 3. Prizefighter doesn't feature spit and blood flying out of mouths; in fact, the only blemishes we saw were red splotches forming around eyes and mouths.

Prizefighter has plenty of promise thanks to its inventive presentational style for the game's career mode, which is sure to be where most players will spend the majority of their time. Our main concerns are with the in-ring fighting and overall replayability. Apparently there is one path through the 50 fights in a career, meaning that if you break your hand in the third fight then you'll always break your hand in that fight, no matter if you start fresh with a newly designed boxer. The actual boxing needed another coat of paint as well as its fluidity was lacking, thus bringing the overall realism.

Other facets of Prizefighter are certainly ready for primetime. The soundtrack is robust, the list of licensed and unlicensed boxers is promising and the ideas behind the career mode are all original and make good use of the Don King name. We'll have our detailed hands-on to you in the coming weeks as Don King Presents: Prizefighter's June 9 release date creeps closer.