Your opponent is circling, looking for the opportunity to land a punch. You’ve been pretty successful picking off his meager offerings, but you have yet to unload the bomb on him. Gloves are up to block and you have your head weaving, ducking and dodging his right-handed jabs. He decides to go for broke and fires in a left hook. You see it coming and lean back. His punch hits nothing but air, but more importantly, the entire left side of his face is totally exposed. Your straight right fires out, a beautiful counterpunch and it hits hard, staggering him. He is dazed and his guard starts to drop. Opportunity is about to be answered with a barrage of heavy blows.

Fight Night Round 4 is the most robust and somewhat ambitious offering in the Fight Night franchise, taking the foundations set down in FNR3 and expanding them in the areas that could have used some work. The counterpunching system is a devastating improvement to the analogy thumbstick-driven punch and movement system. The R2 shoulder button is a punch modifier, allowing fighters to go for that heavy punch, but this is also a stamina-draining attack and because stamina is so important, you have to be careful of using it too much. While the head dodging also drains stamina, it does allow you to avoid the punch and unleash the counter that can be very devastating.

Also new – rather improved – is the Legacy system, which is basically the career mode from Fight Night Round 3 but with improvements. Notable among those improvements is the addition of fighters, like Iron Mike Tyson. While Tyson’s antics later in his career sullied the image most people have of him, when he was younger, he was an amazing fighter. That aspect can be revisited in certain ways thanks to FNR4. In Legacy mode you can create your own fighter and take him up the ladder toward the championship (the AI is very good and as you progress, the fights will be much harder; use the same ring tactics too often and they seem to come back to beat on you), or you can take an existing fighter and work him through the ranks. You can even edit him … marginally.

Much like previous iterations, it begins with an amateur tourney, which is – more or less – the tutorial (yes, there is a tutorial in the game, but you don’t really understand what is going on, or the pacing of the fights until you get into the game itself). During his first amateur bout, ‘Iron’ Mike waded through some probing jabs and ripped in a couple of body shots until his opponent dropped his hands to cover his midsection, then pulled off the patented Tyson duck and power left hook to knock out his foe. It was simply spectacular.

There are several ways to play the game – you can quick fight, enter the Legacy mode and even take the game online. The latter was not available on the test unit code sent for this review.

In the Legacy mode, you schedule a fight date and then before the fight, you are granted a training session in which to improve your skills. More training games are in place with FNR4, with each of the six targeting areas to improve your fighter in between fights.

Graphically, FNR4 is amazing. The fighters not only move very well, but the muscle tone and the way you can see the muscles bunch and strain is impressive. There are some anomalies, though, that can’t be overlooked. For example, you’ve just beaten a foe almost senseless and he has sagged against the ropes. You continue to fire off shots and as he is sliding toward the canvas, you connect with several more punishing blows to the head … and he still manages to get up at the “5” count and fight more or less normally.

When it comes to the sound, the musical score is very good and appropriate for the game. The sound of devastating punches landing though, often the subject of the knockdown replays, is off. It is the same bone-crunching sound effect whether you hit the stomach (there are bones in the solar plexus?), the ribs or anywhere on the face.

The game’s controls really ask that you pay attention to how you fight. Punches are queued and if you get into what amounts to button mashing, you end up throwing a lot of silly punches and do not take advantage of the openings that might appear.

Still, Fight Night Round 4 is truly a remarkable bit of programming. Boxing has sometimes been called the “sweet science” and EA Sports has crafted a game that gives some credibility to that. This is a strategic affair that will ask players to think before they barrel in and throw 100-plus punches a round. Yep, this is a first-rate sports title.

Gameplay: 9.0
The controls are intuitive enough and the game factors in elements like fatigue, but overall, this is one of the most realistic fight games to hit the market.  

Graphics: 9.0
The look of the fighters is amazing, and with movement tied to the stamina meter, this is a nice bit of eye candy. The UI will not knock your socks off, but everything is laid out in an easy to understand manner.

Sound: 8.2
Every hard blow lands with the same bone-crunching power, which is sort of silly, but the music is good. The blow-by-blow announcing can get a tad repetitive.

Difficulty: Medium/Hard

Concept: 8.7
The improvements are obvious and impact the game play in a major way. The improved legacy mode is wonderful to explore and hopping in as Mike Tyson as a young boxer is pure joy.

Multiplayer: N/A
A robust multiplayer system is in place once this game goes live. Unfortunately, the disk used for the preview was for the test unit and elements of the online multiplayer were not available with the version received.

Overall: 8.9
EA Sports has managed to turn the fight game into the science it has long been proclaimed to be through the use of the new control mechanics and counterpunch system. Graphically, the game is stunning, and while there are a few stumbles along the way, nothing truly detracts from the strategic enjoyment one gets from this game. This is a wonderful step-up for the franchise.