PS3 Fitness Game Reviews 4

Review of The Fight: Lights Out for Playstation Move

The Fight: Lights Out
Reviewed by PS3Fitness.com on November 20, 2010 .
Summary: A fighting game that provides a better aerobic workout than most fitness and exercise titles.

Rating:
5 of 5

I review a lot of games that can be used for fitness and exercise. Very rarely has a game provided such an intense workout that just after a few minutes of playing with it, I’m covered with perspiration and my muscles feel tighter. It happened with The Fight: Lights Out.

It takes a while for you to get started with this game. When you pop the disc into your PS3, you need to wait a few minutes while the game data installs. You’re instantly introduced to “Duke”, your grizzled virtual trainer who looks like he’s been in a couple fights himself in his day (the graphics are so detailed it’s hard to tell if he’s a real person or a computer-generated image).

While this is primarily a fighting game, there are fitness elements throughout. You start out by entering your weight, height, and age. Your BMI is calculated for you.

You can then choose a look for your fighter. You select from a variety of faces, beards, hair colors, and hair styles. Chances are you can get someone approximating your look. In the next step, you divide 60 “ability points” into various categories: strength, speed, stamina, chin (your charater’s ability to take a punch), heart (your character’s resolve in staying up despite taking a beating), and technique. In the course of the game, you can win more “ability points” to further strengthen your character.

In the next step, you calibrate your Move controllers (you need two of them). The process is a bit more involved than usual. You need to center yourself in the camera, stretch your arms straight out, and then move your remotes back and forth. You can also take a picture of the background without you in it to enable head tracking, which will supposedly track your head movements just like a Kinect (I couldn’t get it to work on mine, possibly because I had objects in the background).

Duke will go on to tell you how to play the game. You’ll need to keep your feet in place when boxing. You hold down the Move button while angling your controller to the sides, front, and back to move your character. You’ll also learn how to read the various elements in the game which represent your character’s well-being. There’s a health meter and a stamina meter, neither of which you want to run out. There’s also a rage meter, which goes up each time you get hit and adds fuel for “dirty moves”. A diagram of a skeleton will tell you if any part of your fighter is injured and needs to be patched up.

Once you finished the tutorial, you’ll see four menu options:

  • Events: Takes you through different fights of increasing difficulty. With each fight, you’ll earn money, reputation points, and new moves.
  • Training: Will let you re-do the tutorial or take new tutorials on sparring, heavy bag, speed bag, target practice, and endurance sparring.
  • Fitness: Shows you how many calories you burn while playing.
  • Fighter: Lets you adjust your character’s appearance, assign new “ability points” you earn, heal from injuries, and apply “boosters” which you earn during your fights. You can also download cheats online (which, of course, come at an extra price).

As for the actual fighting, it is by far the best fight experience I’ve had in a video game. Your onscreen character reflect your motions almost perfectly–and even mimics hooks, jabs, and uppercuts pretty well. It does take a little while to get used to fighting on a two-dimensional screen–it’s hard to gauge depth, so often you may be swinging and missing at your opponent (the game does work with 3D, so I suppose with a 3D television this issue would be solved). You can also switch camera angles, which helps.

Other than that, it’s a remarkable simulation of actual fighting. After each fight, you can view the calories you burned as well as statistics (punches thrown, punches connected, “dirty moves”, and punch accuracy). You can even view a video replay of your fight. Like I said, after about 5 rounds I was breathing hard and felt my muscles tighten. What’s great is that I didn’t want to stop–I just wanted to keep pounding the tar out of my opponents. I have a feeling that of all the games I have to get in shape, this is going to be the one I go back to most often.

If you’re looking for a workout and exercise title that’s not like a wimpy and prissy Jane Fonda video, you’ll be thrilled at this one.



4 Comments

  • Reply
    doug
    Mar 24, 2011 6:23 am

    They released a fitness pack for the fight lights out. It includes some new exercises that you can do by themselves or you can do them all in a circuit routine.
    You can choose round length and difficulty as well.
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Nv2ucMqY3w

  • Reply
    am
    Jun 29, 2011 12:12 pm

    Duke is a real person…He’s Danny Trejo.

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