UFC 6 review: a bloody, brilliant MMA fighting game

Becoming a professional fighter takes years of repetition, drilling techniques and training footwork until everything is instinctual. Your body needs an automatic answer for every limb, from every angle. In MMA, which encompasses every martial art, it’s even harder.

EA Sports’ UFC 6 realistically captures the grind of this brutal discipline. Throw on Career Mode and you spend most of your time working on combos and techniques. It’s all about making the complex controls feel second nature, increasing the effectiveness of every strike thrown by your fighter. With simulated six-week-long training camps between bouts, you can sometimes spar 12 times before a fight that could be over in a matter of seconds.

It’s an authentic fighter experience. In real life, these athletes spend relatively little time actually trying to take each other’s heads off with a shin, and most of their time training. In a game, however, it’s a bit of a slog. Once you’ve proven that you can ace these drills you can skip them, but you get fewer benefits. And it’s still laborious, as is tending to your inevitable injuries.

Happily, the fighting itself is excellent. UFC games have had a bit of a rock-’em’-sock-’em quality to them, but this latest instalment does a great job at creating more natural animations, flowing beautifully between the different levels submissions, wrestling, and stand-up — of an MMA fight. It looks almost worryingly realistic, too. From the pores on their skin to the wrinkles on the soles of their feet, these character models are the most detailed I’ve seen in a sports fighter, as impressive as Fight Night was when we saw HD video games for the first time. You can even tell who’s a standup fighter and who’s a wrestler by who has the most disfigured ears.

Every fight takes its toll on their bodies, too, with bruises and cuts appearing in direct response to your strikes. Blood droplets fly through the air and stain the canvas. When you land a knockout punch, the slow motion replay cranks up the volume so you hear the crunch of bone on bone and see cheeks wobble like a basset hound barking at a hairdryer.

A welcome new addition is The Legacy, a story mode that mythologises the rise of an up and coming fictional wrestler who’s trying to escape the shadow of his famous father, while brewing up a rivalry with another prospect at the same gym. It’s fully acted-out melodrama, your very own Rocky story, shining a light on how violence occasionally spills outside the Octagon and stains careers; inbetween fights, you attend press conferences and respond to provocations on social media.

The story does a great job of pulling you along for the first few hours as you go from rivals to friends and back to rivals again. It gets you invested in the action and raises the stakes, but the narrative climaxes near the beginning of your UFC career and then fizzles out. It feels like a bit of a missed opportunity to keep you engaged when you reach the top and have to defend your belts. Nonetheless, between the fluid fighting and the story-mode razzmatazz, this is the best version yet of EA’s fight-sim series.