Better than 2009 in every way, but could still use some improvements.
I've played this game for about 15 hours now and I can safely say those hours were definitely not wasted. I've always been a career mode kind of guy. In UFC 2009 I skipped every other mode and delved into career. With UFC 2010, this was no different. So let's start by reviewing the new and improved 2010 Career Mode.
First off, it's better than 2009, and it should be. But it still has a few flaws that deter from the experience. Career mode 2010 is too short. Like in 2009, you will build your fighter from the ground up, but after 42 fights, with 41 knockouts and 1 loss to submission, there won't really be anything else worth doing. During that time, I changed weight divisions (apparently you can only do this once... for no reason), became a two-time champion (light heavyweight and middleweight), entered the hall of fame, and defended my title a billion times.
You start out by customizing your fighter. You all know how that goes. Name here, detail there. This time you won't pick your fighting styles though. At least not in such an indiscrete way like in 2009. This time you pick a technique, a stance, and an AI for your character. The game will give you your starter moves based on your answers. The problem I have with this is pretty mundane but it's worth pointing out: I wanted to create a Karateka (like me) and a BJJ fighter, but the in-game announcer introduces me as a "boxer and street fighter"... oh well.
This time you won't start in the UFC. You have to make an impact in the "lower leagues" first. Don't worry, this won't take long. You begin by fighting amateur opponents. These are classified as "Beginner, Experienced, Advanced and Expert". You select who to fight, and the game uses your selections to tell you what difficulty to play in. After each fight, the game will prompt you on turning pro or being an amateur for longer. I always postponed turning pro so I could gain a few more weeks of training before doing so. You can have 4 amateur fights before you are forced to turn pro. When turning pro, the game plays a Cut-Scene (which are new in 2010 and are pretty cool and immersive) and makes you select a difficulty (this is PERMANENT). I selected beginner at first, and 40 fights later I'm still stuck on beginner. They should have given us the option to change this, at least to a more difficult setting, as the game has become too easy for me in career mode.
The pro fights are exactly the same as the amateur fights. You can have about 6 or 7 of these before the UFC and Mr. Dana kicks open your gym's door and forces you into the UFC. And the UFC fights are exactly like the pre-UFC fights... but with more "fireworks".
Win a bunch of UFC fights and you'll become the number 1 contender and fight for the title. You'll attend weight-ins and choose to respect or disrespect your opponent (respect means friendship, which means more points in camps, IF you're camping with that fighter. Disrespect means a popularity boost). Assuming you take the title, now you have to defend it. You go through the same process as contending: Weight-ins, etc.
After every title defense, Joe Rogan will interview you. He'll ask things like "walk us through that knockout", "how did winning your last match prepare you for this match?" etc. You'll usually have four different answers to choose from (again: respect, disrespect, popularity, etc). After five fights, you'll begin skipping through these dialogues as they become repetitive very fast.
Once the UFC gets fed up with you (you've beaten a whole bunch of contenders), they will host the Fight of Fights... which is you versus the champion from a weight class above yours. Beat him and you fill a Hall of Fame pre-requisite (become champion in two classes). The UFC will then prompt you a bunch of times on joining the upper weight class... and the whole process begins yet again. Don't worry though, you won't get a belt in the heavyweight division if you started as a middleweight (like I did), because the UFC won't prompt you on a weight change ever again. (This sucks by the way... THQ). So you can't start from the bottom class and beat every class in the game (would be fun, but no-can-do).
Your fighter, once again, has three main physical attributes (STR, STA, SPD). This time though, training STR won't reduce SPD, etc... like in UFC 2009. However, you are given three "stable" attribute values... 30, 50 and 70. Raise your attributes to 70 and you're OK. Raise it to 71 and after a few weeks without spending time on that attribute, it will decrease to 70. If you got something at 100 and you don't spend time on maintaining that, it will RAPIDLY decrease until it hits 70. This goes for your physical attributes AND your fighting attributes. You gain physical attributes by training (it's all automatic, like in UFC 2009... just a bunch of menu clicking) and you gain fighting attributes by sparring.
Sparring... the "homework" you got to do in every UFC game (to date). In 2010, you have two options... Focused and Free sparring. Free sparring will give you points for whatever you do and whatever your opponent does in a sparring session. Focused sparring lets you choose where to focus your training: Stand-Up, Ground and Pound, etc. Focused sparring will only judge you in the area you chose. So if you choose Ground and Pound and all you do is kick and punch your partner, you will get no points. Focused sparring is the EASIEST, MOST LOGICAL way of maintaining a VERY high attribute. Why? Because it gives you BONUS points.
Bonus points cannot be saved; they have to be spent as soon as you get them. Bonus points will ignore the point requirement that every skill has once it gets past level 30. A 90+ skill will require 20 REGULAR points (gained via free sparring) to go up 1 point. Because Bonus points ignore this, you can spend 10 bonus points on a 90 skill to get it up to 100. Focused sparring can only be done once per fight in career mode and it works best (like free sparring) when your fighter is well rested (about 40% fatigue) (the game will give you more points when you're not injured [you get injured sometimes when you train at 100% fatigue] and when you're not very fatigued). This means that you HAVE to specialize. I specialized in standing up. Which means that I use focused sparring to max out my Standing Kicks Offense/Defense and Standing Strikes Offense/Defense. You can't use bonus points you got doing focused stand-up sparring on skills like Submission. And you can't have a fighter that's maxed out on two different areas because your skills will just decay way too fast for you to maintain more than 4 different maxed-out skills. This works out great and keeps the game balanced.
There is one problem with sparring though: It gets boring and repetitive very fast. ESPECIALLY due to loading times. If you want to spar two weeks in a row the game will forcibly load the same sparring scenario twice, instead of keeping you in that loaded instance. It takes about 10-15 seconds to load this thing if you're using the game disc and not your hard drive. The game should just ask you when you're done sparring the first time if you want to spend another week sparring... it would save us quite some time. Even if did that though, sparring is still repetitive, and while there is the option to AUTO-Spar, it is BY FAR not the best way to rack up points. An auto spar at 100% fatigue, non-injured, will give you 10 points (with a maxed-out sparring partner, on Beginner difficulty). A Manual spar on the same conditions can give you about 50 points on a really good session. In other words, you must spar, and you must do it manually, especially in focused sparring.
Another aspect in career mode is Camps. This is where you gain skills. In UFC 2009, camps would teach you skills specific to your fighting styles. In 2010, you get to pick what move you want LB + B to do for instance. Basically, you pick the Camp option from the career calendar and the game vomits on you a big list of camps (American Top Team, Greg Jackson's Gym, etc). You then select a camp to see its list of moves. Hover over a move and the game will show you a mini screen of what that move is. This sounds good, but it is NOT. If you are trying to find a particular move, you WILL get lost and you WILL waste time going through all those camps and their move lists. It would be nicer if we had the option of going through the entire move list, independent from what camp it belongs to.
Select your desired move and a sparring session will begin. If you selected a punching move, you will have to land strikes on training pads. If you selected a kick move, you will have to land combos on your opponent to rack up points. Get enough points and you will learn your move. This sounds fun, and it is. But it is also very unbalanced. Learning a punch move using pads is VERY easy compared to learning a kick move by doing combos.
If you have made friendships with other fighters, you can practice a move with them. Supposedly, this should give you more points, but it doesn't work like that. Believe me when I say that practicing with Joe Bob is much easier than practicing with Lyoto Machida. It is much harder to hit Lyoto; ergo it is much harder to get those needed combos to count.
I won't get into customization (trunks, etc) in detail because it is mostly the same as UFC 2009. The game does give you unlockables though (kind of like the EA sports games: Fifa, for instance) where you can purchase celebrations, etc. Fun, but not very functional, as I cannot edit my career fighter's victory animation... which means I spent those points on nothing. I guess they only apply to new fighters.
How did I get these points? Well, by doing title defenses. And no, not in Career mode. Career mode will not give you any points to spend on the "Extras" store (accessible via the Game Progress option on the main menu). You get points by fighting in Title Defense mode. Another fun mode that becomes available after you beat Title Mode (again, nothing to do with career, although you CAN use your career mode fighter).
Title mode and title defense mode places you against a series of fighters (title mode gives you the option to pick how many fighters you have to fight, title defense makes it 12 and that's final). You gain points by not bleeding, knocking the dude out, etc. After each fight the game tells you your point total for that match. You get to keep these points even after losing a match on title defense. Why would I lose a match after going 42-1 in career mode? Well, because title defense "heals" your fighter before every match, but if you get hit by too many body shots, your body will obviously become very damaged, and the game will only heal so much. Which means that if you get really damaged in one fight, you will start the next one kind of beat up, giving your opponent an unfair advantage that he WILL pursue, especially in harder settings. I have yet to beat title defense mode because of this (I played twice in Expert settings). The farthest I got was 9/12 (9 wins before I lost). I actually like this because it gives me something challenging to do.
In conclusion... this is a great game. It's not perfect, but it's definitely worth 60 bucks. It is better than UFC 2009, and if you're a fan of that game, then this game is also for you.
Just a few more things, including a short guide:
- If you're a stand-up fighter, don't forget to use points in submission defense, ground grapple defense, etc. The one defeat I had was to Demian Maia who submitted me in the first round. I had to elevate my ground skills to 70 (the max stable level) to be able to defeat him by knock out. Whenever he took me to the ground, I held the right stick away from him to block his moves and keep him in place, allowing the ref time to get us up again. Rinse, repeat until he gets enough kicks in that head of his. You can only do this with a good ground grapple defense skill.
- Don't worry too much about your kicks and strikes skill in the beginning. Having better, stable ground skills are more beneficial. A low kick skill with a good speed and strength level should be lethal enough to get your knockouts.
- When creating your fighter, you will be given a lot of points. Don't spread them across the board. Max all of your favorite skills at 20, and then spar to quickly get most of them to 30. The skills you couldn't stabilize will rapidly deplete until they reach 0 and you can't do anything about it.
- Game Plans (new feature in 2010) are useless. They basically boost a selected attribute category and takes away from others to balance things out. This would be more useful if it didn't take one full week away from your training. I used this quite a bit in the beginning and never thought I was being positively affected by it.
- The game has a good (for the most part) help screen in career mode. It clarifies quite a few things that the tutorial doesn't mention. Check it out if you have doubts.
- You have a trainer called Marc in UFC Undisputed 2010. He's pretty dumb though. He really won't be much of a factor at all during your career. The game shows him giving you advice in cut-scenes and all but he really won't make a dent on your career. There is a trainer tab in career mode where you can ask for his advice. I used this to ask him about my next opponent when I personally didn't recognize them. I wanted info on my opponent's ground work, etc. But the trainer's answers are extremely vague and, later on, pathetic (ie: "Keep doing what you're doing and you can take this guy." Yeah, thanks for nothing.). You're better off checking out your next opponent's profile on Wikipedia if you want to find out how good of a ground fighter he really is.
- There's this annoying thing called Flash Knockouts in this game. For the most part, you can avoid these by not having a 100% fatigue level (try resting once the week before every fight). I found this out the hard way. Flash Knockouts happen when you get punched in the middle of your face by what looks like a jab, while the fight appears to be very much in your favor... and your fighter just blacks out and falls like a rag doll.
- Body kicks are very effective. They can be used from a distance and are rarely defended because fighters mostly focus on defending their heads. Body kicks will drain the opponent's stamina and will eventually even knock them out (they fall to the ground gasping for air), although it takes longer than kicks to the head. Body kicks are also much harder to grab (head kicks will sometimes result in your leg being grabbed by your foe, who can then take you down or punch your face in [not as painful as it sounds]).
- Sponsor logos are ugly but they are your main source of "Cred" (money... used for upgrading your sparring partner and your training equipment). Fill your trunks, shirt and cap with logos from DIFFERENT sponsors. Don't just place a million THQ logos on your stuff like in UFC 2009 as it won't work in 2010... only one counts.
- The Muay Thai clinch leading to knees to the face is still very overpowered. Try taking down your opponent to escape this. If he sprawls, you will likely get a knee to the head though, but that isn't as bad as 40 other knees in a clinch situation.
- Like in UFC 2009, skip every interview, press workout, etc. These events take up a week and give you a crappy popularity boost. They are a waste of time and aren't even fun.
- When starting out, always pick the fighter with the lowest rating as your next opponent. Sometimes this will even be the main event fight, with the most Cred reward. Sometimes it won't. Don't worry about fight reward Cred though, as most of it will come from your sponsors.
- You have three really tough fights in your career: your first Pro fight, your first UFC fight (where fighters jump from a 40 rating to a 60-70 rating) and your Champion vs Champion fight (after all, you are fighting the champion of an upper division.. he's tougher than you). Plan accordingly.
- Even Lyoto Machida and Anderson Silva don't have 90+ Ratings. This is due to the point-decay mechanic being obviously applied to the core fighters. I believe this is very cool and makes me feel good about my 79 Rating fighter. (79 is pretty much the best rating I've seen... 76/77 being the second best). You won't be able to go a lot over 80 due to the decays, so be content on having a good 70+ fighter to play around with. On a side note, the overall ratings on the select-a-fighter screen are gone. You can open a screen with all of that fighter's attributes but you see no Overall rating. Sometimes you just want that rating to show up and make things easier. It will be shown on different screens though.
- Some stats are outdated. This is fine, but in some areas the same stats are updated... (Lyoto Machida is listed with a 15-0 record in his trading card, 16-0 in the select-a-fighter screen and 16-1 (accurate) in some other "inner" screens).
Okay... sorry about the looooong review. But I hope I cleared a few things on this great game. Enjoy.