The new Fight Night demo is out on Xbox live. MattyC and Musashi spend some time with it. The verdict? Garbage.

First off this is not a review. I would never base a review around a brief bit of time spent with a demo. That is why this is under my rants and raves area. With that said, Sashi and I spent some time with the Fight Night Round 4 demo this weekend and well... it is just awful. I was a huge fan of 3 and couldn't wait to get into 4. After playing it for about 15 minutes I can say with confidence that you can probably skip this game.

Don't get me wrong, it isn't all bad. One of the week points of Fight Night 3 was Joe Tessitore play the pronoun game by himself until you could hardly tell which fighter he was referring to. This appears to be massivly improved. Tessitore is joined by Teddy Atlas who adds a great amount of flavor. Once the action gets going they can often lag a bit behind, but this is still leaps and bounds ahead of 3. The boxer intros are also much more elaborate now. While that isn't a make or break feature it does add to the immersiveness. The new 'get up from a knockdown' is accomplished by lining the sticks up to level yourself rather than just getting two circles to overlap. Again a small thing, but it just feels better than Fight Night Round 3. As far as controls go they are still as solid as ever. I was unable to find the button masher setup in the demo so this may be lacking in 4, but since I never used that it had little impact on me.

Ok, now I have covered the good, let us touch on the bad... and this Fight Night has plenty of bad to go around. First off the graphics are awful. You would think between 2006 and now EA could have made some strides in that department, but you would be very wrong. The boxers look plastic, and not just plastic but also cartoonish. It is like an unholy union of a Wii Smurfs game and Sarge's Heroes do boxing. Muscles look like stretched GLAD trash bags, horribly out of place flashes of light spark on opponents after counters, and I think Pacman was replaced with a zombie Jafar from Aladdin. It is horrifying, and sadly the failing are not limited to the visual realm. The sound effects are even worse. The punches sound something like Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots. In our first demo match we were both dying of laughter after just a few punches.

Now you might be thinking "Hey that doesn't matter if the gameplay is great!" and I guess you would be right. Except for the punch sounds; seriously you can't overlook those. That said it could still be a great game to play on mute! Alas, this was not to be! The gameplay is about on par with the visuals and budget sound effects. The game now has a big stamina bar. We never figured out what it is for, but hey it is there. You can apparently unload punches for about... ever and not deplete it. The cut and swelling between round game now has something to do with cups or water for points, again we didn't really understand this and frankly it frightened us.

In conclusion, this is one of the worst game demos I have ever played. It isn't even that the game is that bad (though it isn't good by any measure) so much as it is a letdown. I really hope this is some sort of joke and EA plans to deliver a real followup to Fight Night Round 3 soon. Until then if you want a fighting game stick with 3 or pick up a copy of the new UFC game.