Def Jam Fight for NY

Create Your Character

A fun aspect of story mode is that you have to create your own character. The process starts out as a police sketch where you pick different facial features and then they are filled in just how you want them. When you are done, that sketch is magically turned into a 3D model and it looks pretty awesome. Throughout the story mode, you earn money that you can spend on new clothes, hairstyles, tattoos, and jewelry. There are hundreds of choices and it is easy to create a character that really is an extension of yourself. The way your character looks and how much jewelry he has plays a role in how much the crowd likes you, so you have to constantly play with your characters look throughout the story mode and it is actually a lot of fun. Even better is that all of the jewelry, sunglasses, and scrawny beards you give your character all look really good and they fit on the model perfectly and don’t look pasted on like in some games with similarly ambitious creation aspects.

Earn the Skills to Pay the Bills

You also get to customize your characters moves to a limited degree. You can go to a gym in story mode run by rocker Henry Rollins and pump up your stats or learn new moves. Your character can learn up to three fighting styles such as wrestling, kickboxing, or street fighting among others. Learning new styles will give you new punches and kicks and grapple moves to use. Sadly, you can’t customize basic fighting moves for your character, but you can choose what Blazin’ moves you want to use. Each new style you learn opens up new Blazin’ moves you can buy and then assign to one of four slots. It is nice to be able to choose your Blazin’ moves and this helps ease some of the repetitiveness in the fighting, but being able to fully customize your move list would have made Fight for NY absolutely awesome. The game is fine without it, but it would have raised the game from great to perfect had it been included.

Graphics and Sound

Graphically, Fight for NY looks really, really good. The character models are all big and beefy and very detailed. It is fairly easy to recognize all of your favorites, which is what really counts. The animation is also very smooth and the fights look fluid and realistic even if the action is more than a little over the top. The environments you fight in are also nicely detailed and really tie together a great looking visual package.

The audio is also well done. All of the rappers have recorded at least pre and post fight taunts and many of them actually play very important roles in the story mode and all of the dialogue sounds great. The soundtrack consists entirely of rap music, but like I said earlier, the songs were carefully chosen so that they would appeal to everybody and not just rap and hip-hop fans. I would go so far as to say the soundtrack is very good, and that statement should carry some weight coming from a metal head such as myself. The sound effects of fighting are also exceptionally well done and sound appropriately vicious and painful. This is a great looking and sounding game.

Bottom Line

Def Jam Fight for NY is an early favorite for best fighting game of the year. It is seriously that good and I think it can easily stand up to DOA Ultimate as well as the sudden resurgence of 2D fighters that have hit this year. Everything is so well done and the game just feels right when you are playing it. A few words of warning, however. It is an “M” rated game and it has definitely earned that rating. In addition to the extremely violent combat, the dialogue is riddled with profanity. It always fits into the context of a situation and fits the theme of the game well, but if you are adverse to such things you had probably best avoid Fight for NY. You should most definitely keep children away from it, though. For the rest of us, Def Jam Fight for NY is a great fighting game that I highly recommend for a purchase. Rent it if you are unsure, but it is fun enough and big enough that I think you can really get your money’s worth if you go ahead and buy it.