Jab with your left, protect with your right. Hands in front of your face, keep moving and don’t let him settle into a rhythm. No, not tactics for making your way safely out of the pub on a busy Saturday night (although you could try them I suppose), but the kind of instructions which will fill your brain during and after extended play sessions on EA’s latest pugilism simulator, which has landed on the 360 in better shape than ever before.

Offering a selection of boxing’s most celebrated contenders from the past and present, the game gives you the chance of recreating famous bouts from history whilst also allowing you to throw two boxers who never met together into the squared circle for a few rounds. Ricky Hatton up against Muhammad Ali? Evander Holyfield taking on Oscar de la Hoya? Everything’s possible here.

The main meat of the game can be found in the career mode. Here you create your own boxer and take him through multi-year ladder system which sees him progress from being a promising amateur right the way up to being the world champion and beyond. Starting off with modest stats and equipment, you are able to train your boxer and purchase and win new equipment to give him the added edge during his fights.

Training sees you completing a series of mini games based loosely on regimes that would strengthen your character. Strength, for example, can be increased by taking part in the weightlifting exercise, where you move both left and right analogue sticks up and down in time with a power bar to have your man lift and release the weights on his right and left arms. Each of the three mini games take a few minutes and will need to be repeated throughout your development, with each raising some attributes and reducing others, meaning you can’t keep doing the same regime repeatedly and only see a gain in ability. The key here is spreading the training equally across, which in a way mirrors the training real life boxers undertake.

Working your way up the ladder by selecting from a choice of a few offered contracts each time will see you meeting a wide range of fictional and factual boxers in the ring, which certainly gives you time to perfect your in-ring technique. Although the game spends quite a bit of time explaining the virtue of the analogue sticks and various combinations of turns and spins to enable your boxer to jab and swing it is in fact much easier just to map the different punches to the face buttons and use the sticks for movements, leaning and protection. Timing of your punches is crucial and a parry system has been introduced to try to encourage the use of defensive tactics, although the fact that a good parry can stun your opponent for a good number of seconds perhaps takes the game slightly away from being a boxing simulation and puts it more in the realms of being a fighting game.

Fight Night’s biggest punches however are thrown in the graphical stakes. The game looks utterly outstanding and presents painfully realistic fighters who bleed, shatter, swell and sweat with wince-inducing clarity. The graphical prowess also has meant that EA have done away with the HUD and put the responsibility of realising when your boxer or your opponent is struggling straight onto your own ability to discern the relevant information from how the fighters look on screen. The fact that this is actually very possible to do says more about the graphical realism the game projects than any screenshot or movie, as impressive as they are. Not everything is quite so solid though; clipping issues rear their ugly head and see boxers fall partly through ring ropes after collapsing or suffer the agony of having their limbs disappear into their body at various angles.

Elsewhere, the thorny issue of product placement crops up. Obviously with Fight Night being a sports title you’d expect the odd mention of a few glove manufacturers and the like, but the line seems to be crossed later in the game with blatant Dodge and Burger King adverts via the not-so-subtle methods of having a car parked alongside the ring and having a fast-food mascot accompany your fighter to the ring on occasion.

This aside, the game still hangs together and offers a good sporting title for the player. Multiplayer thrills are to be had in online and offline modes, with the Xbox Live implementation being pleasingly lag-free. One big red cross next to the mode though must once again go to a game which allows players on the verge of losing to quit and not have the game awarded to the other player, which given the general nature of quite a percentage of Xbox Live means a whole load of frustration is headed the way of the honest players who are more than happy to take a bite of the canvas now and again. Offline battling doesn’t carry the same risks obviously (and if your sparring partner does run off before losing you can carry out swift revenge in person of course), so many an hour can be lost with a friend exacting brutal haymakers and uppercuts between your fighters.

For the aspiring boxer and the fighting fan alike, Fight Night offers plenty of fun. Technically impressive and with a sturdy backbone of simple, rewarding gameplay the game will keep you coming back for plenty of punishment time and again. Whilst perhaps not offering the authentic boxing simulation or the varied, impulsive fighting masterpiece, Round 3 happily jabs its gloves in both directions and serves up something that will keep the majority of players more than satisfied fight after fight.