Some people say that boxing is dead. With a heavyweight class full of no names and the middleweight fights becoming technical tryptophan, boxing’s popularity is waning. People are watching MMA at all time highs and the sweet science seems to have taken a back seat. Boxing video games have been very good of late, and Don King has thrown his towel into the mix. Can the best promoter in the business deliver a knockout with his first attempt in gaming?

Prizefighter has some outstanding features but at the same time some things are so bad that the game has to fall into the void of mediocrity. The first thing that you will notice here is that the music is very good. It is going to be hard not to compare this to Fight Night, but you sort of have to. The music here really owns. Yet, at the same time, the voice over work is very bad. Your corner-men have about 3 lines of dialogue. You get a good comment if you won the round, a bad if you lost, and an in between if you tied. After one fight, you have heard all the game has to say. The venues are well done but people don’t buy games from the background textures.

The career mode is done very well. It is done like a documentary. You get generic FMV clips from people who say every cliche in the book, but its a nice change. You feel like you are actually inside of the life of a boxer. You are treated to some Don King moments where he speaks in a language few can understand. The training games are a blast. They are rhythm based where you need to press buttons at the right time and have a nice mix of difficulty and reward. Training is a fun side game but shouldn’t be the best part of the career.

Then comes the gameplay. Oh man, this is disaster. First, you punch with the buttons not the sticks. This seems like a huge step backward. Secondly, the response time between buttons and action is an eternity. Its almost a full second. This is not good. You press for a jab, then… the jab happens. Boxing should be a fluid and brutal ballet. This looks like a monkey banging a watermelon. You need to block with the RS while moving with the LS. Awful. What’s worse is the replays of KOs. You smack a guy in the face and on the replay, you seem to hit him on the shoulder or the chest. Collision detection is poor based on a game that is nothing but collisions.

What is even more of a disaster is the fighting roster. I follow boxing close, and the fighters they picked are a joke. Andrew Golota and Shannon Briggs? These guys are stiffs and have not fought in anything important in years. The middleweights are a little better but no matter who you pick, they look nothing like their real counterpart. The graphics here are just not good. If you hid the names, it would be tough to tell who is who.

Prizefighter shines in some areas, but it seems their focus was on all the wrong parts. When the graphics, gameplay, and roster are less than decent, the game just misses. There are some good ideas here, but unless you love boxing and are tired of Fight Night 3, there is no reason to even give this a rent.

Overall: 5 of 10

Click here to see what our reviews mean.