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Don King Presents: Prizefighter (XBOX 360) By: Adam Waddilove Does Don King’s boxing game pack a punch or is it a complete Knockout? Don King Presents: Prizefighter will bring the realism of live action match-ups and the true tactics of the sweet science together for the first time. More than just a night at the fights - players will be responsible for building a career by overcoming adversity, avoiding temptation, and balancing their commitments to train and promote, all while focusing on the goal of ultimately winning and defending the title belt. The story will be told by a revolutionary sports documentary-style narrative never before seen in a video game. EA Sports’ Fight Night Round 3 was the best boxing game of the next-gen thus far, so with Don King entering the ring to take it on, you’d expect it not to hold any punches and be the best boxing game ever. Unfortunately, nothing can be further from the truth..Don King Presents: Prizefighter is a sluggish and disappointing one that will make you hope that FNR 4 is the light at the end of the tunnel. You play as “The Kid” a boxer that you can customise yourself, and the game does do a good job of delivering a sports documentary about him with all the boxing pros and Don of course. You are an up and coming boxer, so you’re just starting out and so you’ll need to train before each fight to raise 4 meters that will help you in the fight. The meters are for strength, stamina, agility and dexterity and there are 5 total training exercises for you to do. You can auto-train but you won’t get as much experience from it, you’ll usually get 2 weeks between fights so you can only do 2 training exercises before each fight. The problem with that is that before each fight, you’ll feel completely unprepared for it and it causes many problems as a result. The training exercises are horrible as well. You’ll do normal things like punch bags, skip rope, run and spar with a trainer but the controls are very bad. The punch bag requires you to hit certain spots on the bag but it moves so fast that your fighter can’t keep up with it. The skip rope and run modes are button bashing messes, think of a more complex version of Guitar Hero or Boom Boom Rocket and you’ll get the picture, the only half decent one is sparring, you just tap one button at a time when it comes up on screen. Fighting itself is incredibly sluggish. The Achilles heel of Prizefighter is the stamina meter, it depletes too fast. You’ll be punching for a few seconds and it’ll be more or less drained, making you step back to recover and then go back for more punches. The problem is that any health you’ve taken away from your opponent recovers quickly, so you’re punches may not even do much overall. You can improve the stamina bar with training, but that’s a complete pain as well.    Another problem is blocking, apparently you use the right analog stick to put your arms up but I could only do it in one direction, trying to block your sides seemed impossible. FNR 3 allowed you the choice of button bashing fighting or using the right analog stick to throw punches; Prizefighter doesn’t allow you such a choice and reduces fights to mindless button bashing. Or it would be if the stamina didn’t drain so fast, it’s a case of punch, step back, rinse and repeat. During the campaign you’ll take part in famous fights in the old days, and you’ll usually be a fighter with a problem, you could be tired from fighting or have an injury that the opponent can capitalise on. The problem is that these fights are insanely tough and the stamina drains twice as fast, sure they don’t mean much overall and it’s ok to lose them, but it sure is annoying. You’ll need to beat a ton of fighters to move up to the tougher challenges, but you’ll have problems as well. Your hand will get busted early on, making it hard to use but some fights help out with fighters having an injury of their own, but that’s rare. Each opponent has their own fighting style, be it charging straight at you for a close fight or just punching and moving. I tended to just go in with the right hook and I usually won, that’s if an injury didn’t arise. Graphically, Prizefighter’s visuals are disappointing. They don’t look nearly as good as FNR 3 and that came out ages ago, why they didn’t make the best use of the hardware is questionable. Lip-syncing during cutscenes is incredibly poor and there plenty of ugly jaggies to make us cringe. Voice-acting is perhaps the highlight of the whole game, even if it doesn’t really add much to the whole experience. The Verdict Don King Presents: Prizefighter is a disappointingly, sluggish boxing game. It handles poorly, the training events are a pain in the backside and you’ll always feel unprepared for each fight. I’d hold off for Fight Night Round 4 if I were you. 
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