The animations on fighter faces have undergone significant changes, with a total of 64,000 facial injury combinations possible. Longstanding problems still remain in the ground game and some dated visuals, but without any competition for the title, EA Sports UFC 4 still remains the king of combat sports. The new submission system is a big improvement over prior years, there are some great changes to career mode that make it much more fun to mold a fighter that suits your own playstyle, the new grapple assist system is a great tool to help complete newcomers not feel lost if they get taken down, and as a whole, the fighting system remains incredibly deep. What we said about EA Sports UFC 4ĮA Sports UFC 4 is a largely iterative sequel that tightens up some looser parts, makes a few smart tweaks here and there, and doesn’t rock the boat all that much. This can leave you with diminished capabilities, forcing you into making tough but rewarding decisions to either weather the storm and heal up between rounds or go for broke and try to finish your opponent before it’s too late. Icons in the shape of eyes and lungs will then appear under your health bar as a result, indicating both a loss of vision and difficulty breathing for your fighter. For example, if you take a lot of shots to the face, it could break your nose and create cuts above your eyes. UFC 5 counteracts this by making the results from damage much more realistic, with more sophisticated Health Events that have a deeper impact on the player. Additionally, a finish was often necessitated by a Health Event from a particularly damaged area (Head, Body, Legs) which was hard to see coming at a glance. In UFC 4, fights never felt as high stakes as they do in a real MMA match, mainly because visible injuries were few and far between, and wounds didn’t continually bleed over time. UFC 5 is the first game in the series to carry an “M for mature” ESRB rating, and it’s not hard to see why. It deftly balances these approaches into something much more fluid and life-like than past entries while also raising the stakes of every hit thanks to an impressive new damage system, which makes matches more exciting, risky, and rewarding. Finding the perfect mix of both sides is what makes EA Sports UFC 5 the best MMA game to date.

Lean too hard toward simulation and you could alienate all but the most dedicated fans – but, move too far toward the crowd pleasing violence of something like Mortal Kombat, you might stray from that “as real as it gets” tagline instead. It can be difficult for an MMA game to balance two seemingly contradictory halves: being both a satisfying sports simulation as well as a satisfying fighting game.

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