The Fight: Lights Out – Review

The PlayStation Move has generally seen games tailored towards light gaming and family audiences. With The Fight: Lights Out, Sony is attempting to take the Move towards the more hardcore gamers. So is this fighting game worth your time and money? Read on to find out.

The game starts out with a pretty comprehensive character creation mode, which is followed by a series of inexplicably ridiculous video tutorials hosted by Danny Trejo. This is an ominous sign of things to come. The game tries laughably hard to appear hardcore and edgy by including Trejo doing some magnificently campy gameplay demonstrations, but fails miserably. These tutorials take you back to the horrendous videos that games on older consoles used to have.

Curiously, the game makes you calibrate your controller before every single fight. The tutorials take you through the basic gameplay mechanisms such as throwing punches and ducking and weaving. However, this is not as easy as it sounds, because the controller often loses the preset calibrations and only regains it after much furious button mashing. Even punching – a mechanism that should’ve been fairly natural using the PS Move is done poorly. No matter how many furious punches you throw, your character reacts on screen with the agility of an arthritis patient. Hit detection is abysmal, and when the punches do eventually connect, they often look like a pat on the back.

If you want to move, you have to hold down the Move button on the controller and tilt it either side-to-side or forward. But since the game requires you to be stationary at all times, even moving slightly off the mark will cause your already poor hit detection to drop even further. And most of your opponents will dodge your attacks either by circle-strafing or plain moving backwards. This will mean that most of your time will be spent playing catch-up, rather than doing any actual fighting.

The game lives up to its “Lights Out” tagline in a most unusual manner. The game features a head-tracking mode which uses the PS Eye to allow you to duck and weave. Unfortunately, even in the best setup, the game will likely detect your lighting as “terrible” and ignore the head-tracking mode altogether.
The career mode has you visiting generic locations and fighting against generic opponents. Even the old 2-D fighting games you might’ve played put more thought into their career progressions system than this one. Seriously, this is plain lazy development. Incredibly, the money you earn will be spent on “luxury” items such as shirts and shoes. And if you thought the single player was bad, the 2-player multiplayer mode is even worse.

EA’s excellent Fight Night series employed a stamina mechanism that added an extra element of strategy to the fighting. However, there is absolutely no reason why it should be present in a motion controlled fighter like Lights Out. How are you supposed to react to your on-screen character running out of breath when you are fresh and raring to go?

Even the graphics of this game are highly uninspiring and will make you feel like you’ve seen them in dozens of games before. Although the bland color palette suits the underground fighting theme of the game, it ultimately makes for a dull playing experience. The fighters themselves are decently detailed and show visible wounds over the course of a fight. But even this is overshadowed by the poor choice of locations, since every fight seems to be either in a basement or a parking lot of some sort.

In summation, The Fight: Lights Out seems like an extremely rushed game that could possibly have been better with more attention to control schemes and graphical detail. As it stands, the game is plain annoying to play. The flawed controls, generic visuals and frustrating multiplayer mode will have you running for the door almost immediately. A big thumbs down!

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