One of the best fighting game engines revived on the XBox.
It was the sport that shocked the world when it first hit pay per view. It is the Ultimate Fighting Championship. After years of tournaments, it finally made it to video game form and found a home on the Sega Dreamcast. Now XBox owners have a chance to check out an excellent fighting game that may have passed them by months ago.
UFC: Tapout has been in development for a while, and with the addendum to the title, I think a lot of us were expecting a sequel. What we actually received was a port of the original DC game with more fighters and less extras. Tapout offers exhibition, arcade, UFC, and tournament modes. The arcade mode lets you take on opponent after opponent as you try to set the win streak while the UFC and tournament modes allow you to make a run for a UFC belt. What I don't understand is how you can spend months and months on a pseudo sequel and take out key elements from the original. Tapout does not offer a career mode like its DC cousin, nor can you learn new moves for your created fighter. What's amazing is the gameplay and other modes are more than enough to make up for this gross oversight.
Tapout's fighting engine can be summed up with one phrase, simplistic complexity. At its heart, there are only four buttons to worry about. Each represents the attack of one limb, just like Tekken. Sure one could fight just by using these buttons to strike their opponent, but just like in the real UFC that won't last long. The bulk of the action revolves around striking, grappling, and countering striking and grappling. If there is an offensive move in the game, then there is a way to stop it. Be it as simple as blocking or as complex as reversing a shoot into a top back mount position.
See, many of the fighters from the UFC like to take the match to the mat. The most common way to accomplish that is to shoot at them (tackle at the midsection and legs). Like I said though, shoots can be countered like every other offensive move in the game. What you may have to resort to is maybe catching a punch and throwing them to the ground or reversing one of their shoots to an advantageous mount position for yourself. Mounts come in three different flavors, each with a top and bottom. A common shoot will end in a "mount" with the top opponent straddling the bottom who is on their back. After grappling and reversing a bit the combatants may end up in a "mount-guard" where the bottom has managed to wrap his legs around the top's waist. While the top position is usually much more advantageous, some fighters are comfortable and have many moves from the bottom of this mount. The last style is the kiss of death for the bottom, and it's called the "back mount." This has the top riding the bottom like a horsey, and the bottom can't do much but take massive trauma to the head.
Tapout gets real deep when you examine all the possible moves and counter moves from each of these positions. For instance, your fighter is on the bottom in a regular mount. The top fighter is throwing a series of punches at your skull which you are doing your best to block. Then, with precise timing, you press both punch buttons on the downswing of the next assault by your opponent, catching his arm and flipping him over. Now you are on top in the mount-guard position and ready to deal out some damage of your own.
Each move usually has a couple of ways to escape. The catchall defensive maneuver is to spin the control pad in a circle twice. This action will move you from a bottom mount to a bottom mount-guard if your opponent is resting on top. It will move you to a standing position if you are in bottom mount-guard, and it can counter any grappling move. Sounds easy enough right. Well, if you use the pad rotation to counter grapples or shoots, it usually leaves you in a real bad position. For example, if you counter a certain leg lock in this manner, your opponent will roll you over to the back mount position. Boom, your match is over.
Once you get the hang of it, the real counters turn into reversals. They are performed by pressing either both punch buttons (for upper body submission) or both kick buttons (for lower body submission). If these are timed properly, like my punch reversal example, you should end up in an advantageous mount position following the reversal. If you mistimed it, you'll tap out and lose the match.
Stamina plays a role in this game as in real life as well. You can basically punch yourself out. Two gauges run over top of one another (red and green). The green bar goes down as your stamina expires, and the red represents your sustained damage. If you rest, the green will fill back up to meet the red. The catch is, when the green bar disappears, you're done. If you have full health, but have punched and kicked your stamina down to the very end, one shot could knock you out. Add to the striking, grappling, countering, reversing system the fact that stamina also plays a big role, and you are looking at one mean in-depth fighting game.
Honestly, with as good as it plays, the graphics need only be there to visually show off the situations correctly. Fortunately, these are some of the best looking visuals around. The fighters are scary-real looking, and they animate without hiccups and with perfect transitions. Facial expressions are also top notch. The octagons that you fight in could be a little more varied. There is an option to choose the city where the fight takes place, but they all look the same to me. The camera angles are give and take. You get the good, which is cinematic switching between views on the ground to give you dramatic angles for the beatings, but you have to take the bad, which is certain camera angles that land behind the ref or outside of the octagon. When you hit the bad views, it's too easy to misjudge a counter attempt and end up tapping out.
Tapout is a game that you'd want to turn up the volume for as well. One of the best parts of the action is hearing the sound effects of the damage being done. The body blows and tackles to the ground kick up surprisingly crisp bass, and you'll surely enjoy the joint-crushing sound that comes along with a successful submission hold. My only complaint is that the crowd cheering (screeching!) is so annoying. It wouldn't be so bad if there were a way to turn it down in the options, but this isn't possible because it's tied in with the regular sound effects volume. So in order to save your precious ears from the screeching, you have to give up on the bone crunching and slams? Not worth it in my opinion. You'll learn to tune it out.
UFC: Tapout sports one of the video game world's premiere fighting game engines. It's a little short on the options, and therefore suffers a little in the replay value. You can only play the computer so many times, and it often makes silly mistakes. On my first day of playing I put together a 51-win streak in arcade with Caol Uno. Two player matches are great and never get old, and it's always something you can pick up and play for a few minutes at a time. If you missed the first release on the Dreamcast then you really shouldn't skip out on Ultimate Fighting Championship this time.
