It’s inevitable that, at some point during the normal course of one of my days, I will end up getting stressed or worked up over something, and it’s for this reason that I love playing boxing games. Be it Muhammad Ali Heavyweight on the original brick Game Boy, Ready 2 Rumble on the Dreamcast or Fight Night Round 3 on the 360, having the opportunity to bludgeon someone in the face with fists of fury is an invitation to mash all the tension right out of my system, and in particular this is fun when it allows me to repeatedly smash Jay in the chops for breaking UltraNinjas again and again. Who said violence solves nothing?

Taking this into account, one could probably assume that I was rather looking forward to Don King Presents: Prizefighter. It’s been a good few years now since Fight Night emerged from the locker room and strolled its way down to the ring amidst a fanfare of wonderful graphics and a satisfying, instinctive control system, so with 2K Sports in the training room and an intriguing faux documentary idea on which the main mode is based it was all set to quench my punch lust in a flurry of well-produced fists. Then it went and dropped the ball.

You see, when it comes to the production values and sense of immersion, DKP:P (also known as Donkey Boxing to those who’ve consistently been mishearing me all week) ticks a heck of a lot of boxes. You start your career as ‘The Kid’ (presumably not the Milky Bar Kid), with Don King and a host of other famous boxers like Joe Calzaghe and some random actors and actresses hamming it up with some live-action snips about your supposed career. You’re then allowed to hop into a pretty comprehensive create-a-fighter mode and make your featured pugilist, from which point you start picking fights, training and boxing your way up the ranks.

This sets the whole thing up to be a fun-packed ride from obscurity to fame, but pretty quickly the game’s biggest problem hits you in the face like a Ricky Hatton left hook: the boxing is a bit… well, naff. Now, Fight Night was never massively tactical and flurrying punches together could drop some opponents, but by the same token it did actually reward the careful precision boxer by having opponent AI that occasionally would block and weave and only leave a few choice weak spots to pick away at. Prizefighter sadly seems to lack this, and in most cases just jabbing away at someone’s face and then unleashing a few signature punches should see them tumbling to the canvas sooner rather than later.

On top of this, the game lacks a control system that feels instinctive or enjoyable, with the face buttons being used and resulting in a number of different combinations that can tie your fingers up in knots. Thinking that perhaps moving away from a system to ingrained into my mind as the two stick and trigger approach that EA took had left me a little lost, I handed the controller to someone without any previous boxing game experience and found that he often complained about the thing being somewhat confusing too, especially when it came to blocking and throwing uppercuts.

There are other issues too, both of which seriously affect Prizefighter’s sense of satisfaction when it comes to duking it out in the squared circle. For starters, the harder difficulty levels are somewhat cheap and resort to having astonishing comeback abilities and iron-clad defences that are at times impossible to breach in any way at all. The second problem is that the collision detection on your blows is often slightly askew, with boxers’ arms sliding past someone only for their opponent to reel back as if hit by a truck. Oh, and when it comes to connecting with your punches, they never feel weighty or substantial enough, which is something that Fight Night most certainly got right.

Thus, the actual fighting bit of Prizefighter becomes somewhat annoying. This massively hampers your enjoyment of the career option, as whilst it’s fun to wait for Mr. King and co to jut in with their latest story-weaving excerpts it is the main fighting that really needed to carry the mode on its back. Added in to the frustration are the training options that offer a selection of mini games that are either dull or, in the case of the rhythm-action style one, massively too difficult. Pretty quickly you’ll find yourself grinning and bearing the nuts and bolts simply because the story and theatrics are fun enough to grind between, which is a massive shame as it could – and should – have been much better.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about Prizefighter, though, is how crushing ugly it is. I hate to keep on harping on about Fight Night Round 3 here as I am sure I’m beginning to sound as repetitive as a skipping Coldplay record, but it really puts Prizefighter’s angular, rather plain-Jane boxers to shame (I like that rhyme thing there, so I am leaving it in). Quite how a game that has been released some 24 months after EA’s fighter can look this poor by comparison is a really chin scratching matter, and as such it hampers the game’s attempt to capture the brutal, savage edge of the sport further.

Outside of all this, 2K have done their best to pack in a decent amount of content for us to unlock and play with; boxers like Joe Calzaghe, Jose Luis Castillo and Andrew Golota feature amongst over 30 modern day fighters, and boxing legends like Crith Eubankth, Joe Louis and Rocky Marciano are all unlockable through flashbacks that supplement the main career mode. There are also a number of arenas and entrance tunes to fight in and prance to, and once you have been somewhere or found something in the career mode you can use it in the one-off single match option.

Multiplayer options offer themselves in the form of classic local player battling and an online mode, although the latter seems somewhat temperamental at the time of writing and often fails to connect two fighters up properly. When it all manages to tie the string at both ends it seems to run pretty smoothly though, so it’s not a complete write off.

It’s not terrible by any stretch of the imagination, but when compared with things that have come before it, Prizefighter falls short in a whole number of areas. The idea of giving the player a false documentary to work through with a number of comments and plot twists is, to my mind, very much a step in the right direction and it’s these parts that make the game worth trying out, but when you don’t get the boxing part running through the spine of a boxing game right then you’re always going to fall short. With a little tweaking and a lot of spit and polish this series could certainly end up going somewhere, but for now it needs a heck of a lot more gym time to shape up.