My experience with The Fight: Lights Out began with Danny Trejo, the mottled, 66-year-old star of this summer's Machete and past prison boxing champion, insulting my fighting skills.
"Don't point it like you're stabbing a dude," he yelled at me before stepping back and demonstrating proper pugilistic technique with a pair of PlayStation Move motion controllers. I laughed aloud. It was one of the most memorable moments video game boxing has ever provided me.
Looking back, I suppose it was inevitable that the rest of the game would pale in comparison. I just wish its downhill slide hadn't been so steep.
But first I'll discuss what it gets right (aside from employing one of my favourite camp movie stars). Put plainly, it is the deepest and most realistic motion-controlled boxing game I've experienced. Fights are presented in a gritty, grainy monochromatic style with bright red blood speckling fighters' faces. And players can spend hours building up a unique fighter, changing his appearance, earning taunts and animations, and evolving his abilities in half a dozen categories, from the typical-speed and stamina-to less traditional attributes like "heart" (refusal to give up) and "chin" (the ability to take heavy hits).
What's more, we can bet on matches, choose whether to use dirty moves (like head-butts and punches to the top of an opponent's skull), treat performance-affecting injuries, and train in the gym to improve our fighter's skills.
However, it's greatest selling point is that it offers players exacting control over their fighters' blocks and attacks. With a PlayStation Move controller in each hand (you need two of them) players move their arms as though they were the ones in the ring and watch as their avatars almost perfectly emulate each swipe and deflection. The PlayStation Eye even tracks head movement, allowing players to naturally duck and avoid punches.
But this is also where things start to dive. While the game accurately captures all of our movements it can be frustratingly difficult to actually land a punch or block an attack. Your boxer will do exactly what you do, but he'll whiff when he shouldn't and take a beating like a human punching bag rather than successfully deflect incoming blows.
Plus, moving around the ring is a drag. To shuffle about you need to point the controller in the desired direction and press a button. To jump left or right you must make wide swipes. It's clunky and unintuitive. Worse, it can open up your defence. I'd almost have preferred automatic movement.
And while head tracking is a good idea in concept, the camera typicaly lost track of my face once or twice each match, despite testing and registering my room's lighting conditions as "excellent." I had to jump back to a calibration screen-something you'll see a lot of, since the camera and controllers need to be re-tuned before every match and training exercise-in order to get it up and running again.
These are core issues that have an impact on pretty much everything we do in the game, rendering all of the things The Fight: Lights Out gets right almost moot. It's a shame, because this is the first motion controlled boxing game into which hardcore players can really sink their teeth. Sadly, I've become too frustrated during my first few hours with it to want to keep building up my fighter and growing his repertoire of moves. I suspect I won't be alone.