Pride Fighting Championships Review
For those of you who notice that I usually do a fairly indepth review, I was going to try and keep to my usual standard here for Pride: Fighting Championship. But right from the start, I don't like this game, I don't like hardly anything about it and I wasn't a big fan of UFC Tapout etc, so I couldn't find enough to say to warrant a deep look at it.
So instead, I dedicate this review to my friend, dungboy, who has always wanted to see something really get slated. I pull no punches, and usually THQ offers some pretty decent games - everyone's allowed to have a few smelly socks in their drawer though.
Pride suffers right from the start, it lacks gameplay modes for one thing and there isn't even a career mode, no belts...nothing...so the first punch misses the mark and hits the wall, so to speak. You can use any of the 25 combatants to pummel the daylights out of any of the other 25 combatants, or spend a laboriously long time creating your own fighter (one of the best things about the game).
See, I did like a few things.
Pride has some nice graphics compared to the UFC titles previously, but that's not enough to lift it above the utter mind-numbing pain of listening to the appalling voice work and suffering as the slow animations and slightly dodgy models, grunt and groan in a display of geriatric testosterone fuelled rage (?).
If you have friends then this game is going to keep you entertained for a short while, before you put it down and find something else like Smackdown or the Dead or Alive series. While Pride might have some nice intros and lots of polish compared to the previous UFC titles, this level of mediocrity should be reserved for dodgy movie to game conversions and the like.
Martial Arts is supposed to have some kind of grace, but all this reduces the various fighting styles to is a frenzy of mad button mashing in the vain hope that you can get a person pinned to the deck and give them a royal ass kicking. I thought we'd gone beyond the bare-bones games a long time ago, this one's a real step backwards in the Beat-em-up genre. But I guarantee that there'll be someone out there who loves this game, and will come forwards to defend it - baring his or her teeth and decrying the reviewer down.
This game will only really appeal to the die-hard PPV crowd who like to watch this kind of action, the rest of you who actually prefer a little more control and finesse, not to mention actually getting some bang for your buck, extra game modes and other features - will turn around and wait for the next iteration of Smackdown or another good Beat-em-up.
I like something called Gameplay, I also like to feel that I'm getting somewhere in a game, in Pride it was a chore to play and that's not what I expect to spend my money on. I want to be entertained, I want to be given a challenge, I don't want to have to slog my way through poorly conceived cheap fighting action where the only goal is to lay the smack on someone in the quickest time possible, because I got bored trying to master fiddly controls on a slow game.
Pride brings nothing new to the arena apart from the decent creation system for the fighter and the fact they have some nice production values, compared to the previous games - but since the previous games were actually pretty rubbish, this isn't a high compliment at all coming from me.
To be honest, I'd rather watch paint dry than play this game.
There's not much more than I can say, do yourself a favour, if you're not a die-hard fan of this genre. Get something else, please, it will save you the time and trouble of garrotting any sales assistant who tells you it's great.