Our protagonist is the surprisingly likeable Andre Bishop, a fledgling middleweight contender with the world at his feet. Moreover, this allows the developers to explore more adult themes in its new Champion Mode, capturing the magic of boxing’s underdog stories with a story campaign that takes its cues from practically any Hollywood boxing movie you care to imagine. It’s still difficult to outright discredit the astounding levels of detail, though, and one cannot naïvely expect to pick up a boxing simulation without seeing some blood mixed in with all the sweat and tears.

There are instances, invariably when your bruised and bloodied fighter ends up looking like the sorry lovechild of Joan Rivers and Sloth from The Goonies, where this warts-and-all approach can feel excessive: The cuts below the fighters’ eyes are often too deep and too bloody, their noses too disfigured, and their stained faces become too excessively swollen, which makes the game seem a little too enamoured with the barbarism of the sport. EA Canada have catered the game towards more mature audiences (rather than Round 4’s Teen rating), which allows them to recreate the sport’s gritty authenticity with immense attention to detail. With Fight Night: Champion, this objective becomes more brutal and graphic than ever before. The name of the game, regardless of how you dress it, is to batter seven bells out of your opponent. Capcom 3 as well as the latest UFC console offering, though, because they all share one uniform objective. Question marks may still linger as to why this game shouldn’t be judged alongside Marvel vs. Granted, its own prequels are probably the only noteworthy competition, but EA Sports’s latest instalment captures the essence of the sport with spellbinding accuracy. And while I cannot purport to be at all sagacious on the technical ins and outs of “The Sweet Science” (a self-styled moniker that attempts to distance the sport of boxing from any masochistic, hyper-violent stereotypes), Fight Night: Champion must be considered pound-for-pound the definitive boxing simulation bar none. Though staunch boxing fans would argue otherwise, it’s difficult to ascertain where combat-sports simulations start and more frenzied fighting games end.

Fight night champion review