Boxing, and boxing games, are in a strange place at the moment. In the sport itself, we have a high-ranking member of the Saudi Arabia Royal Court clicking his fingers like a Roman Emperor at the Colosseum to create the fights that fans have long been wanting to see. On the games front, meanwhile, we have Undisputed, a flawed but strongly supported boxing sim that’s undisputed in its genre by nature of the fact that it’s the only serious boxing sim to have been released in over a decade (and, if I’m not mistaken, the first ever one on PC).
Another thing that speaks to the state of boxing is that the headline feature of the new Undisputed DLC released yesterday isn’t the three Mexican boxing legends included in it, nor James ‘Buster’ Douglas—the man who infamously toppled a prime Mike Tyson in one of the biggest upsets in the history of the sport. No, front-and-centre of the new DLC is the man who beat a 60-year-old iteration of Mike Tyson, ‘The Problem Child’ Jake Paul.
Now, I don’t doubt that there are plenty of people who’d happily fork out the $16/£13 asking price just to send the YouTuber reeling around the ring with haymakers, but it might not be so easy. Based on the 12 fights he’s had against retired MMA fighters half his size, basketball players, and a boxing legend some 35 years removed from his best days, the devs have deigned to give Paul a rating of ’84’. That makes him better than Hall-of-Famer Arturo Gatti, on par with two-weight world champion Ricky Hatton, and good enough to give the 87-rated Light Heavyweight version of Mexican superstar Canelo Alvarez a decent scrap.
On the bright side, a big free update has come to Undisputed alongside the paid DLC, and includes a couple of new venues, improvements to the career mode (you can now move up and down in weight classes), and various other tweaks. What the update doesn’t seem to address however, are ongoing issues with the game’s unstable online mode, nor generally unsatisfying in-ring mechanics. Having last played the game about a month ago myself, I found that punches felt far too soft, were massively inconsistent in registering, and there was an overall lack of fluidity when it came to stringing together combos. It’s kind of stodgy, and feels inferior to Fight Night Champion, which came out 11 years ago now and is in my eyes still the GOAT of boxing games.
It’s a shame, really, because Undisputed’s popularity speaks to how much demand there is for a Fight Night successor, but at the moment it feels like licensing and collaborations with Saudi Arabia and Jake Paul are a higher priority for the developers than getting the game itself fighting fit.