Home Gaming Don King Prizefighter – Xbox 360

Don King Prizefighter – Xbox 360

4 min read
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Don King

I would classify Prizefighter as a boxing simulator, in the same way that you have racing simulators. Also in the same way, you have good simulators and bad simulators. With Prizefighter, they tried to make the game as realistic as possible… I’m still waiting for the day where, in a boxing game, you have the ability to bite off your opponent’s ear. I mean you can’t get more realistic than that.

As can be expected on any sporting game, there isn’t much of a storyline that can be talked about. No twists, no unexpected surprised. Prizefighter does not differ in anyway. In the career mode, you play “The Kid”, a boxer that has made his way in the boxing world from “rags to riches”. The whole career mode takes on a documentary view of The Kid’s career, even including video interviews with various celebrities giving their thoughts on The Kid, haphazardly and randomly added between load screens.

    Don Kings Prizefighter

    In career mode, you start off creating your character. This is done the same way as a lot of MMORPG, where you have the ability to change your character in any possible way, anything from a different hairstyle to the colour of your eyes. The next step is your initial training where the controls are explained. Now, as I said above, Prizefighter tries to be so realistic that they have thrown just about every button combination into the game. So much so, that after said training, when I was thrown into my first bout, I couldn’t even remember something as basic as blocking. The button configuration is to put it quite frankly overpowering and sometimes not logical. The block for instance (yeah, I figured out after a few fights), is your right analog stick. With the block there, I experienced, I would block and then want to immediately throw a punch, only to be to slow in moving my finger from the analog, back to the buttons and missing the hit. Also the fact that there are only three configurations for the controller and you aren’t allowed to customize the controllers to you liking is a big drawback.

    When fighting, both your character and opponent have three bars below them. One represents your health (this is used to indicate how close to a Knock Down the character is), one your stamina (how tired you are), and the last your adrenaline. The adrenaline is used to throw more powerful punches and does really help when your opponent is close to being knocked down. I found however, that most fights turned into a button bashing affair, purely because of poor collision detection (I would sometimes score a hit, and nothing would happen and vice versa).

    Fight....

    To progress between fights, you have to access a log (via a PC) and choose your next opponent. Then before you can actually fight you need to do some training, which is compulsory as this increases your characters various attributes. The training is basically a bunch of mini-games, where you have to press a certain button as it goes through a circle or line. I didn’t find these mini-games entertaining and believe that for the Average-Joe this will become repetitive very quickly, probably why they added the “Autotrain” function. This allows you to skip the mini-games and get back to the fighting.

    The graphics are nothing to really write home to about. In today’s world, where every second game pushes the graphics boundary, Prizefighers graphics are totally mediocre. The camera angle sometimes goes wonky, where you are find you are looking from being your opponent. Also character animation in the fights aren’t well done, throwing some combination punches turns into, what looks like, your character flailing around… the animation just can’t keep up. There’s quite a few artists represented in the music score for the game, mostly rap artist though, but I’m glad to say the Eye of Tiger is most definitely there (you can’t have a boxing game without it).

    The developer had some excellent ideas, but at the end of the day, poor controller configurations and bad implementation of said ideas ruined this game.

    Scoring:
    Gameplay: 5.5/10 [The controller config kills the game]
    Presentation: 6/10 [The simulation element was a good thought, but was implemented badly]
    Sound: 7/10 [Music by original artists]
    Value: 4/10 [This game won’t keep you entertained for long]
    Overall: 5.5/10 [Stick with Fight Night Round 3]
    Better Than: [Sitting and doing nothing]
    Worse Than: [Fight Night Round 3]

    Last Updated: July 10, 2008

    2 Comments

    1. Brett

      July 10, 2008 at 13:48

      I don’t want to hate on your review or anything but didn’t the lack of really big name boxers bother you at all?
      I remember looking over the list a while back and most of the featured boxers I had never heard of in my life before.

      Reply

    2. Werner

      July 10, 2008 at 14:38

      Agreed… but I’ve don’t really know that many boxers. Only know the really big names like Ali, Tyson, Ollifield.. and Rocky 😉

      Thought that most of the fighters were old-school fighers.

      Reply

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