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I used my 10 hour trial to play through career mode, and I have quite a few thoughts.
1. Career mode is most certainly better than the previous two games, however, I felt as though it was somewhat falsely advertised. The advertisements made it look like we were going to be able to attend fight conferences and have a lot of control over our social media - that really wasn't the case at all. Conferences were only shown in highlight/update/promo videos, and the social media stuff, although a good idea, lacked any sort of depth.
2. Everyone I fought was extremely aggressive. I chose to play as a wrestler, but there were a few times where I tried to keep it standing and try to have a slow stand up fight and counterstrike. This was hard to do and I never even went to a decision a single time, because my opponent would just rush at me and I had to finish him or take him down to stop that. I also experienced a lot of weird instances where fighters were taking me down when they really shouldn't have been. I had a fight with Junior Dos Santos, and he attempted a couple of takedowns on me, despite my character being a grappler with poor striking.
3. Submissions are way too hard. I was unable to escape submissions at all. Didn't matter how much stamina me or my opponent had, or what our stats were. I just could never escape them. It was so bad that I just paused and restarted the fight anytime the AI started the mini game. I've always been fantastic at submission defence in all previous MMA games, but I can't escape any in this game. Submission offence feels fine from what I experienced though.
4. Every couple of hours, the gameplay got extremely laggy and jittery. I had to restart the game to fix it. Note that I'm playing on Xbox One and chose prefer performance.
5. I kept experiencing a bug where when I would pause the game, it would unpause. I would have to pause it a second time for the pause to actually work. I tried a second controller to make sure it wasn't just my controller.
6. The progression felt very strange and unnatural. It felt strange to have only 2 fights then be in the UFC, then have 5 fights and get a better UFC contract, then 5 more fights before I was a contender, then another 5 before I get a title shot. I kept getting social media comments saying that my next fight should be for the belt but I never fought for the belt until like 12 fights later. Note: I won ALL of my fights, and I finished all of them too.
7. The training and stat progression was strange too. I went from fighting guys that had the same stats as me to suddenly fighting guys that had 10-15 points more than me in every single category. It also felt like the training wasn't really doing much a lot of the time. I feel like the stat breakdown in training should be more detailed. There wasn't even a separate punch and kick stat. It was literally just strike speed and power.
8. When I created my fighter and won my first fight, I clicked to simulate recovery, but the game just froze and wouldn't let me do ANYTHING. I restarted 4 times and kept trying but it wouldn't work. I had to recreate my fighter and start again, fortunately it worked the second time around.
9. Stamina seemed WAAAAAY off from what I played in career, especially for heavyweights. I was getting to the 3rd round of some fights and we both had almost full stamina, despite throwing loads of power strikes and being rocked and dropped in previous rounds.
10. More stamina feedback - I don't think grappling drains stamina in the way that it should. Grappling should drain stamina more than striking does, yet it seems from what I've played that grappling doesn't have much of an affect at all when compared to striking.
11. The gyms were a good idea and a nice addition, but I couldn't help but feel like they were just not done well. EA MMA was far better in the way that they did the gyms.
12. This relates to what I said earlier about the social stuff, but basically the whole fight promotion feature was a waste of time. There was absolutely no depth to it at all. It's a really cool idea, but it just didn't have any depth or real impact.
Overall, it wasn't a bad experience, just a disappointing one. The marketing for this game made it seem like career was gonna be so much improved and so great, but really it just feels like last years mode meshed with some of the features from EA MMA (such as the gyms) plus the new promotion feature. It really didn't sit that well with me, and I'm really disappointed to say that.
I'm hoping that the gameplay issues I experienced were all mainly down to the mode I was playing. I will still be keeping my pre-order, as I spend most of my time with these games playing online, but I must say that if you're someone who is buying this game for the offline modes, I don't think it's worth it at launch - career mode just isn't good enough.
1. Career mode is most certainly better than the previous two games, however, I felt as though it was somewhat falsely advertised. The advertisements made it look like we were going to be able to attend fight conferences and have a lot of control over our social media - that really wasn't the case at all. Conferences were only shown in highlight/update/promo videos, and the social media stuff, although a good idea, lacked any sort of depth.
2. Everyone I fought was extremely aggressive. I chose to play as a wrestler, but there were a few times where I tried to keep it standing and try to have a slow stand up fight and counterstrike. This was hard to do and I never even went to a decision a single time, because my opponent would just rush at me and I had to finish him or take him down to stop that. I also experienced a lot of weird instances where fighters were taking me down when they really shouldn't have been. I had a fight with Junior Dos Santos, and he attempted a couple of takedowns on me, despite my character being a grappler with poor striking.
3. Submissions are way too hard. I was unable to escape submissions at all. Didn't matter how much stamina me or my opponent had, or what our stats were. I just could never escape them. It was so bad that I just paused and restarted the fight anytime the AI started the mini game. I've always been fantastic at submission defence in all previous MMA games, but I can't escape any in this game. Submission offence feels fine from what I experienced though.
4. Every couple of hours, the gameplay got extremely laggy and jittery. I had to restart the game to fix it. Note that I'm playing on Xbox One and chose prefer performance.
5. I kept experiencing a bug where when I would pause the game, it would unpause. I would have to pause it a second time for the pause to actually work. I tried a second controller to make sure it wasn't just my controller.
6. The progression felt very strange and unnatural. It felt strange to have only 2 fights then be in the UFC, then have 5 fights and get a better UFC contract, then 5 more fights before I was a contender, then another 5 before I get a title shot. I kept getting social media comments saying that my next fight should be for the belt but I never fought for the belt until like 12 fights later. Note: I won ALL of my fights, and I finished all of them too.
7. The training and stat progression was strange too. I went from fighting guys that had the same stats as me to suddenly fighting guys that had 10-15 points more than me in every single category. It also felt like the training wasn't really doing much a lot of the time. I feel like the stat breakdown in training should be more detailed. There wasn't even a separate punch and kick stat. It was literally just strike speed and power.
8. When I created my fighter and won my first fight, I clicked to simulate recovery, but the game just froze and wouldn't let me do ANYTHING. I restarted 4 times and kept trying but it wouldn't work. I had to recreate my fighter and start again, fortunately it worked the second time around.
9. Stamina seemed WAAAAAY off from what I played in career, especially for heavyweights. I was getting to the 3rd round of some fights and we both had almost full stamina, despite throwing loads of power strikes and being rocked and dropped in previous rounds.
10. More stamina feedback - I don't think grappling drains stamina in the way that it should. Grappling should drain stamina more than striking does, yet it seems from what I've played that grappling doesn't have much of an affect at all when compared to striking.
11. The gyms were a good idea and a nice addition, but I couldn't help but feel like they were just not done well. EA MMA was far better in the way that they did the gyms.
12. This relates to what I said earlier about the social stuff, but basically the whole fight promotion feature was a waste of time. There was absolutely no depth to it at all. It's a really cool idea, but it just didn't have any depth or real impact.
Overall, it wasn't a bad experience, just a disappointing one. The marketing for this game made it seem like career was gonna be so much improved and so great, but really it just feels like last years mode meshed with some of the features from EA MMA (such as the gyms) plus the new promotion feature. It really didn't sit that well with me, and I'm really disappointed to say that.
I'm hoping that the gameplay issues I experienced were all mainly down to the mode I was playing. I will still be keeping my pre-order, as I spend most of my time with these games playing online, but I must say that if you're someone who is buying this game for the offline modes, I don't think it's worth it at launch - career mode just isn't good enough.
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