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Product summary
Complicated and unresponsive controls combined with uninteresting gameplay and a disjointed story keeps Prizefighter down for the count.
Specifications: ESRB: Teen; Genre: Sports; Number of players: 1 Player See full specs
Price range: $28.99 - $59.99
Gamespot editors' review
- Reviewed on: 06/10/2008
- Released on: 06/10/2008
Don King is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, promoters of all time. The spiky-haired bombastic orator could sell you tickets to your own funeral with one of his patented verbose and sometimes hard-to-follow rants. Don King Presents: Prizefighter needs such a salesman behind it. But even the loquacious Don King can't spin Prizefighter's disappointing gameplay and poor controls into something worth $60. And that's saying something.
Career mode lets you take your created fighter through the ups and downs of a career.
Prizefighter's main draw is its Career mode. Here, you make a fighter with the game's fairly robust creation tools. Once you're done, you'll guide "The Kid" from obscurity to the limelight throughout the course of his career. You book your own fights, and you'll generally have two or three fights from which to choose. There's not a tremendous variation between most fighters, but there are some twists here and there to keep things interesting. One fighter puts something on his glove that makes it hard for you to see, another fighter has the judges in his pocket, and one guy runs out of gas after six rounds, so you'll have to wait him out. This sometimes feels contrived, and it can be frustrating to fight with a broken hand that you never saw your fighter break, but it does help mix things up a bit. After you've won a few of those bouts, you'll unlock a new fight, which is basically a boss fight.
Your created fighter's attributes start off terrible, but he won't be awful forever. Once you sign a contract for a fight, you'll have a few weeks in which to train. There are five ways to train: heavy bag, speed bag, jump rope, focus mitts, and shuttle run. These are all simple minigames where you mash buttons or hit specific buttons as fast as you can. The better you do, the more your attributes will improve. If you don't feel like doing the minigames yourself, you can autotrain and skip the workouts, but if you select this option, you won't get much of a boost.
Career mode's most unique feature is its story, which is told via video interviews with such personalities as Don King, Mario Van Peebles, Larry Holmes, and even a Penthouse Pet. However, the short one- or two-line clips are hard to follow, they're pretty boring, and the whole thing is poorly done. In addition to video clips, you'll receive voice and text messages that move the story along and present choices for your boxer. You're offered training sessions, movie roles, shopping trips, dates, and supplements--it's up to you whether or not you accept. Anything that distracts from your training will lower your boxer's attributes but will likely raise his media profile. The game doesn't really explain what having a high media profile does though, so going out with a woman and losing hard-earned attribute points isn't really an enticing offer.
Not everything about the story is bad, though. Every once in a while, your trainer will tell you about the old days and you'll get to fight part of a classic bout. The fights aren't anything amazing, but they're kind of neat and break up the monotony of the career a bit. They consist of short challenges and use a sepia filter for an old-timey look. You're given a goal, such as last the round to knock someone out, and if you accomplish it, you'll unlock a fighter like Joe Louis, Ken Norton, Larry Holmes, or Rocky Marciano to go along with the game's roster of current fighters like Shannon Briggs, Andrew Golota, and Kelly Pavlik. It's not a great collection current pugilists, but at least there are a lot of them.
Fun Fact: Don King served four years in prison for beating a man to death.
- See more CNET content tagged:
- career,
- fight,
- attribute,
- Take-Two Interactive Software Inc.,
- training
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Where to buy
Don King Presents: Prizefighter (Xbox 360):
$28.99 - $59.99
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$28.99 | No |
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$28.99 | No |
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$59.99 | Yes |
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Amazon.com
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$29.99 | Yes |
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