There’s a strange sense of dread that fills you whenever you watch a UFC event and series of matches, even if you’re a fan of the sport and have seen it all before. There’s a particular feeling that, given how it all pans out, at any moment in proceedings you are going to get a brutal, shocking knockout. Chap A may look like he’s getting the upper hand in a fight, but chap B may suddenly land a well-placed knee to the face and boom, game over. It makes for compelling viewing.

The surprise success of 2009’s UFC title from Yukes and THQ mirrored the fact that in the ‘real world’, MMA (mixed martial arts) events are now beginning to leap above traditional forms of combat sports such as boxing and wrestling in terms of popularity. Names like Lesnar, Machida, Penn and Silva are becoming as well-known across households as your Hayes, Mayweathers, Rocks and Stone Cold Steve Austins. Pay-per-view purchases are in the hundreds of thousands, tickets sell out as quickly as they go on sale and internet forums are awash with discussion. Yes folks, MMA and the UFC in particular are now a very big deal, and the fact that EA have decided the time is high for them to release their own MMA game later in the year is a further pointer to that.

With the momentum of last year’s effort, it’s pleasing to find that initially, UFC Undisputed 2010 feels pretty similar – your fighter can either stand and pop out jabs, hooks and kicks, clinch with the other fighter to land a few cheeky shots to the ribs and head, or slam the opponent to the floor to kick off a series of ground-based positional switching and striking.

However, once you start really digging deep into the game you begin to notice the tweaking that has gone on to make the game feel a little more fluid and natural than it did last year. The first major difference is that this time, via a tap of the right shoulder and a flick of the left analogue stick, your fighter can duck and sway in order to avoid punches and land counter blows. This adds immeasurably to the stand-and-deliver gameplay, with a well-timed dodge and cheeky counter punch likely to stagger your opponent and give you a little window of opportunity to work in. It takes time to get used to the precise nature of what the game defines as a ‘flick’, but pretty soon you’ll find the sway to be one of the most powerful abilities in your arsenal.

The other main change is to the grappling, and it is this that has divided the game’s fan base right down the middle. This time around your fighter has an ‘auto-block’ of sorts, which automatically resists when your opponent tries to transition into a new clinch or ground position. On the one hand, you could level that this is probably more in keeping with how the sport often sees the combatants struggling to get the upper hand on each other, usually resulting in prolonged and rather awkward-looking close-quarters grappling. Countering this, you do feel that the game is now taking a little of the skill involved out of proceedings; whereas players had to learn how to counter and block transitions before, this time the game does a healthy chunk of it for them.

The ground game itself has gone through the works too, getting rid of the button mashing from last year’s effort and focusing it directly on quarter and half turns of the analogue stick. This too takes a bit of time to get used to, although practice tends to teach you which particular transition/escape each fighter is going to attempt with each gesture. It’s not quite an exact science just yet, but it is an improvement over 2009 for sure.

Away from the comprehensive (and thankfully learnable via an excellent tutorial) gameplay mechanics, you have a whole selection of modes to battle through, with the main focus being centred around the career offering. Here, you can create your own fighter in any of the weight divisions and take him through twelve years that will see you beginning in an amateur gym and – hopefully – culminate in a heroic UFC main event farewell match to defend a championship belt, via a heck of a lot of training, training and... er... training.

To be frank, progressing through all this does become somewhat of a drag. The way it works is that your fighter has a fight, and then has a period of time – usually between seven and twelve weeks – to train and improve himself. This can be done in three ways – through sparring, through training or, new to 2010, by visiting training camps and learning new moves. The training itself is simply a matter of choosing between Power, Speed and Cardio for a temporary stat boost (although, as with the sparring there are shelves on which your score cannot drop below upon being passed), whilst the sparring involves you going toe-to-toe with a training partner to gain attribute points to spread across the twenty-or-so separate areas in which your fighter can improve. In this way it’s possible to dictate which particular way your fighter develops, although in reality by the end of your career you should be able to be pretty darn good at everything.

The training camps are new this time around, and it is in these that you will learn different moves to increase your fighter’s skill even further. This has the added bonus of meaning that your fighter isn’t hemmed into two styles you have to decide upon at the very start of your career as in 09, so you can mix and match until your heart is content, with each move chosen being learned after gaining experience points by using either the particular move or a similar one in a sparring session. It’s a very welcome addition to proceedings, and adds endless possibilities to character customisation.

This is all well and good, but a few years into things you soon realise that nothing much is going to change apart from the ever-so-gradual rise up through the ranks. Occasionally when you get to the UFC stage of proceedings you are bothered by some annoying media bird who wants you to do some kind of set training of sparring routine for her UFC website video, but the popularity you lose out on from not doing these is gained back from generally being good at fighting in any case. Thus, the mode turns into somewhat of a drag, even if Yukes did try to liven it up by having the British voice acting for your character being some of the very, very worst that I have ever heard in any video game ever. You half expect your fighter to step out of the ring and go back to selling fish in Camden Market with that kind of accent.

Outside of your career you obviously have Exhibition in which you can take any fighter on the roster and pit them against anyone in their weight division, and a Tournament mode that allows you to set up a knockout competition (pun intended) to decide a division’s new champion.

Perhaps the most interesting other modes, however, are the Ultimate Fights section and the Title and Title Defence modes. The former sees you having to ‘recreate’ a series of the UFC’s most famous fights by fulfilling certain criteria – winning by a certain method, landing a certain move a number of times etc – in order to unlock shop points and video clips. The shop points can be spent on a number of things, such as new apparel for your characters, new taunts, nicknames and even a collection of Topps UFC cards that fill an album and have a little background detail on each fighter. Anyone who remembers collecting Premier League Panini stickers back in their school days will find this strangely addictive, no doubt.

The Title and Title Defence modes are as they sound; the former tasks you with running through a division’s roster in order to get a title shot at the end, whereas the latter sees you having to do the same, except to defend your belt. Each fight has a number of rewards in the form of shop points if you complete the various criteria, so you gain a lot in the way of unlocks from running through this too.

That leaves you with the multiplayer, which in theory sounds excellent but currently in practice is a bit of a laggy mess. Attempts to connect to games proved rather hit-and-miss during my time testing, and those that I did manage to hook up to were wildly variable when it came to lag. Even more annoyingly, there seems to be no current penalty for those people (you know who you are) that would rather disconnect that get a loss on their record sheet, so you have to hope and pray you’re up against an honest fighter or you’re in for a world of frustration.

It’s a shame, as there’s plenty of functionality lodged in there should it start running properly. You can form your own fight camps and train together, whilst also competing against other camps for bragging rights and leaderboard places. You can also take part in one-off matches or tournaments, both of which could potentially be very enjoyable ways to spend evenings. Oh, and before you go thinking that a second-hand purchase may be a good plan, remember that this is one of the first games to come loaded with a one-time code that has to be tapped in to enable to online part of the game, with anyone buying the game from then on having to spent about £4 on a new code on the PlayStation Network.

Then again, if you’re a UFC 2009 veteran or an interested newcomer, buying it brand new is still worth the outlay. It might confuse you initially, but the fantastic tutorial eases you in and the plethora of game modes gives you plenty of entertaining ways to practice. The career mode may be slightly turgid to wade through and the online portion is a bit broken currently, but the positives greatly outweigh the negatives and as a fighting game it’s one of the most satisfying and curiously wince-inducing experiences out there. Add in some pleasing visuals, some of the finest sports commentary in a video game and a wealth of modes and you’re onto a very nice package for your cash.