- Kinect Sensor Required
- Publisher: Ubisoft
- Developer: AMA Studios
- ESRB Rating: “T" for Teen
- Genre: Fighting
- Pros: Okay visuals
- Cons: Awful gameplay; huge lag and bad move recognition; opposite of rewarding
In Fighters Uncaged you play as a dude named Simon who needs to beat up a bunch of guys in order to save his dad from a kingpin. The end. That is all there is to the story.
The game only offers one single-player mode, and nothing else. There is no multiplayer option either online or locally. Yeah, a fighting game with no multiplayer whatsoever. You start out with a tutorial - which lasts forever, by the way - and then you're on to the real fights.
Gameplay
From a basic controls perspective, Fighters Uncaged lets you punch and kick in the real world and translates them into the game. There are a lot of different punches, kicks, and knee strikes, and you have to use different ones to be effective at different ranges. You play from an over the shoulder, third-person perspective and have a pretty decent field of view. Conceptually, this is pretty sound.
Ubisoft
Even worse is how the gameplay is actually set up. Your opponents block and dodge pretty much everything you try to throw. Your only hope is to block or dodge one of their attacks in order to create an opening so your attacks will actually be effective. This freaking sucks, though. All it does is make the game very slow, and very repetitive as you repeat the same pattern over and over again (block, get a couple strikes in, block, get a couple strikes in) and it isn't any fun.
So we have a game with awful lag that also doesn't recognize what you're doing most of the time, and the actual gameplay, even if the rest of it did work right, isn't fun in the least. Bad times.
Oh, but it gets worse. Simply winning fights doesn't actually allow you to advance through the game. You have to meet specific conditions, such as not getting hit or winning faster - both things made much more difficult thanks to the bad controls and poor overall design. It just isn't fun.
Graphics and Sound
The sound is pretty terrible all around. Bad music that loops way too much. And really, really bad voice work. The sound effects also suffer due to the lag. It just isn't very satisfying to throw a punch only to have the "smack" sound a good second and a half later.
Bottom Line
Ubisoft
