Heaps of fun, but a little too easy
Fight Now mode follows your basic "pick a fighter you want to be, pick a fighter you want to fight against and...FIGHT!!!!" formula. And, of course, it's really fun. The idea of seeing your created boxer making Mike Tyson's eye bleed is really cool and it looks even more so. The controls also feel very good and the two options (the A, B, X, Y buttons or the right stick) are very adaptable for both new gamers and seasoned veterans of the series. Every punch feels like it has serious power behind it.
The only bad part of this game mode, and one of the bigger flaws in the game, is that it is too easy. People may be reading this thinking "But your easy may be different to someone else's easy". Background: I have never played a Fight Night game, yet, within my first two hours of playing this game, I was beating the hardest of boxers (Ali, Tyson and Robinson) by K.O. in the 2nd to the 4th round on the hardest of difficulties. Yes, it is very fun to beat those guys up but I want a challenge on the most difficult settings. I don't want to walk out of the locker room and then finish the fight in less than 5 minutes.
Career mode is pretty good as well, but it suffers from two major problems;
# The difficulty/length of player progression and
# The lack of training sessions
It takes forever to build your boxer up to to be anything good and even longer to make him into a hall-of-famer. This is due to the incredibly hard training mini-games. Most mini-games only go for 1 minute. they demand that for an OK score, you need around 15,000 points, yet the highest you can get is 4,000 knocking down your opponent. This would mean that you would have to knock down your sparring partner 4 times to achieve anything significant (which would be impossible because, in a 1 minutes sparring session, that means 40 seconds is taken up by the opponent getting up).
Also, this is further hampered by the enormous lack of training sessions. Boxers train all year round, not for 4 weeks before a fight. It doesn't help that training takes a serious amount of stamina away from your fighter, which determines your starting stamina. Generally, you only get in 3 training sessions in a month. To be a more accurate boxing sim, you would probably get in 20 training sessions. Unfortunately this is not the case, so your boxer never really goes anywhere for a long time.
However, it is not compulsory to do the career mode, so, in that case, stick with the incredibly fun, and bloody, Fight Now mode.
The easiest way to sum this game up would be "Come for the punches, stay for the K.O."