Welcome to our EA Sports UFC 4 Review!
EA Sports UFC 4 launched on 14 August 2020 with EA Vancouver as the developer and EA Sports as the publisher. It’s a sports simulation game that lets you fight in the MMA championships.
Our EA Sports UFC 4 Review will have two perspectives. The main perspective is from Shaun covering the PS4 elements, while Luke will touch on some of the XBO aspects. We decided to give you one overall review rather than two separate ones.
For myself (Shaun), I haven’t played a UFC ground game before, so I have no experience on what the previous titles were like. It’s a fresh opinion on the series, so don’t expect me to tell you if it’s better or not.
So, what’s the campaign mode like? How do you get better at UFC 4 and why is Joe Rogan not on UFC 4? Find out more in our EA Sports UFC 4 Review.
| Main platform reviewed: | PS4, XBO |
| Release date: | 14 August 2020 |
| Price: | $59.99 |
| Genre: | Sports Simulation |
| Players: | 1 |
| File size | 25 GB |
| Developer: | EA Vancouver |
| Publisher: | EA Sports |
Contents
EA Sports UFC 4 Review: Story
For our EA Sports UFC 4 Review, I’m going to start with discussing the career mode. You start by creating the character that will take you through the MMA roster. If you choose to create a new fighter at a later stage, you’ll have to start the story over.
The main reason is that you upgrade stats and moves in this ground game. You earn valuable points per fight and week, which enhances your fighter’s ability to survive and knock out the opponent. It’s a similar system I’ve become used to with 2K’s WWE titles. However, I feel that EA Sports does it better in my EA Sports UFC 4 Review.
Luke: I certainly agree that UFC 4 has implemented stat progression a lot better than the 2k’s WWE series. Not only do you have to increase your stats, but you also have to spend points on skills that deteriorate over periods of neglect. Although the spend cost on re-learning these are significantly less, it does result in the player thinking twice about spending their training points recklessly.
The career mode in UFC 4 revolves around accepting contracts. Each fight contract gives you an opponent to prepare for, which you’ll have a few weeks to hit the bags and train with pro MMA fighters. You can also build up your hype, which improves your popularity.
This feature becomes the norm in the UFC 4 career mode. Accept a fight, prepare at the gym, knock the opponent out and win. If you’re wondering how do you get better at UFC 4, it’s all in levelling up your character and applying the points. I’ll discuss this more in the gameplay section of our EA Sports UFC 4 Review.
You’ll also need to win the crowd. As the hype grows and you win matches, you’ll see the number of fans grow. In turn, it increases your popularity and the positive social media feedback you’ll see.
Luke: The story for me offered up so much promise, progressing through the rookie fights and getting that first placement ranking gave me a huge sense of achievement and satisfaction.
Unfortunately, later on down the line the story just seems to taper out, you go fight after fight without any storyline interaction, fighting the same people time and time again.
Once you’ve defended your title on a couple of occasions, UFC 4 throws in an awesome curveball. Coming up with a challenger who is the champion of a different weight division in order to truly gain that undisputed feeling.
Upon victory, you are given the chance to permanently change to this new division or revert back to your original. This only ever happened once for me out of fifty or more fights. Which was disappointing as I was excitedly anticipating doing it again.
UFC 4 career mode isn’t the only available way you can play the game. You can face friends and family in offline versus modes or create playoff tournaments. If you have PS Plus membership, you can also take the fight online.
In the end, the main story does leave me wanting more, though. While it’s exciting to fight your way to the top, and there’s enough content to keep you busy for a while, there isn’t as interesting a story as in some Need for Speed titles, for example. Still, it was fun to gain favour with other pro fighters and make a name for yourself.
Luke: I don’t think that the story for UFC 4 is bad in any degree. But just feel that adding a bit of variation, a bit of longevity wouldn’t have gone amiss. The story finishes as quickly as it starts. Once everything has been achieved, it just leaves you fighting for the sake of fighting, with little to nothing in between.
EA Sports UFC 4 Review: Gameplay
When you comes to discussing the gameplay elements for this EA Sports UFC 4 Review, it’s mostly a fighting ground game. There are so many button combinations, it may be overwhelming at first. Thank goodness you’ll learn the first batch of moves in the tutorial, and then throughout all the weeks preparing for fights.
How do you get better at UFC 4? You’ll unlock new moves, which you can also level up. Train against pro MMA fighters and you’ll learn their skills. You can also improve your ability to get up from submissions moves or increase your ground pound attack.
Take some advice from our EA Sports UFC 4 Review. Learn how to push in UFC 4, which helps you get out of sticky situations like submissions, ground moves, and clinches. You also need to get better at how to stop takedowns in UFC 4. Spend time with your trainer learning wrestling techniques and grappling moves, especially with how to change grappling in UFC 4.
Despite feeling that there were too many moves to learn in at first for my EA Sports UFC 4 Review, I’m surprised at how quickly I became used to them. I felt like a real pro eventually, even if I started sticking to the same moves to win.
However, I had to learn quickly that the stamina bar is there for a reason. So, instead of heading into the fight guns blazing, I would pace myself. Small combo attacks, a hook here and there, and them bam!!! That’s sweet chin music.
Luke: The stamina bar for me is a unique selling point for this game, making this game stand apart from typical button-mashing fighting games. This system was a great success in the Fight Night game series and it’s great to see it being used to slow the fights in UFC down.
Of course, the difficulty setting does help. Keep it on Normal, and you may find it a bit hard to survive in the beginning. Go easy, and the fights end too quickly. No matter which setting you take, though, I found that the opponents do become progressively harder over time, depending on their star ratings.
Luke: I personally feel that the game could have done with more difficulties. Easy was effortless. Normal at times felt challenging, but I ultimately finished my career with 50-0-0. And the matches in the hard difficulty were unwinnable for my level.
That could have just been me being in between difficulties, but I feel there should have been more difficulty levels available – Much like there is in the FIFA franchise of games.
EA Sports UFC 4 Review Review: Graphics
With the graphics portion of our EA Sports UFC 4 Review, I enjoyed the design elements on the PS4 Pro with outstanding 4K HD quality. You see bruises very quickly, and I loved the blood splatter and smears. Your character also looks very good when it comes to small video scenes or while training and fighting.
Luke: The graphics are aesthetically beautiful on UFC, blood splatters on the mat of the octagon compliment how the fight is progressing. Bloody and bruised eyes indicate how beaten up a fighter is.
However, the animations are reused and recycled a lot on UFC, something which is common on EA titles. Leading to a poorer level of emersion due to the constant desire to skip ring entries and announcements.
When it comes to fighting games I’ve played, Mortal Kombat still has the best graphics for me, but that’s on a league of its own. When comparing to other sports ground games I’ve played, EA Sports UFC 4 is better than 2K’s WWE games in many respects. Some character designs need some rounding off here and there, but I was pleased with the number of items you can unlock as you progress through the story.
Luke: One thing that needs to be worked on for future UFC titles is the physics. Often I will land a clean punch or kick on the opposition and either have my foot clip into the opposition fighters head, or the foot would react unnaturally on impact. This takes away from those match-winning slow-mo replays when you can’t help but criticise how artificial the collision looked.
EA Sports UFC 4 Review: Sound
So, I bet many of you fans are hear in the sound portion of our EA Sports UFC 4 Review. We’ve seen many readers ask why is Joe Rogan not on UFC 4. If you don’t know, he is famous for either commentating on the sport itself or being in some of the previous UFC titles.
However, Joe Rogen has decided to step down from UFC voice-acting. As the creative director for EA Sports UFC 4, Brian Hayes, said:
“Joe Rogan absolutely hates doing voiceover for the game. We’ve basically come to an agreement that we’re not going to ask [Joe Rogan] to do it anymore because he hates it.”
Don’t worry though. Former UFC Light Heavyweight Champion Daniel Cormier and Jon Anik do the commentary for EA Sports UFC 4 and they do an amazing job in my opinion.
EA Sports UFC 4 Review: Final Verdict
Shaun: For me and my portion of the EA Sports UFC 4 Review, I enjoyed my first entry into a UFC ground game title. It’s definitely a stressful experience at first while learning the gameplay, but you get the hang of it. Graphics are excellent on 4K and I love the crunching sound of smacking your opponent in the gob. I do wish there was a more intriguing storyline, though.
Luke: The game for me is a step in the right direction for the UFC series of games. There are bits that I feel need to be worked on for longevity, the career mode being one of them. But that doesn’t take away from the enjoyment of the game. I would definitely recommend at least giving it a go through EA Play if you have an active subscription.
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