Legendary boxer Marvin Hagler once said, “It’s difficult to get up and do roadwork at five in the morning when you’re sleeping in silk sheets.” While this refers to getting rich through combat sports and therefore losing the work ethic you once had, the notion could also be applied to EA Sports and its lack of competition. The Madden franchise, with its NFL exclusivity, has long drawn the ire of fans for a perceived lack of innovation due to its monopolization of the NFL video game space, and after spending many hours with EA Sports UFC 6, I’m starting to worry the same problem might have transposed to this franchise as well.
To be clear, the gameplay in UFC 6 is the best this franchise has seen. Thanks to new ways of differentiating the fighters, either via animations, movements, tendencies, or signature ways of attacking, EA Vancouver finally cracked the code on making combatants feel distinct. And those fighters largely look incredible; though your mileage will vary based on fighter popularity, the biggest stars’ likenesses are often dead-on in UFC 6. This permeates the experience, whether you’re playing a quick one-off fight in the game’s capable online suite or diving deeper into longer-tail modes.
UFC 6 carries forward the series’ pedigree of action-packed fights inside the cage; though grappling options are always available, in my experience, wrestling-heavy affairs are rare. That’s a good thing, as grappling continues to be a sore spot, straddling the line between being too cryptic and too mindless. Instead, fights often quickly develop into high-speed chess matches and violent car crashes. Thanks to improved blocking and more variance in striking, it pays to be strategic, particularly as you manage your stamina over the course of an extended bout. And thanks to an evident focus on approachability, anyone can ease into the action with optional features like slow-motion in-fight moments, beginner control schemes, and simplified grappling.
This entry also introduces a Flow State mechanic, which uses a charging meter and aims to emulate the feeling of a fighter being in the zone. Once you enter Flow State, activated with a push of the d-pad, the background noise fades away, and your fighter temporarily gains a performance boost. This addition effectively captures the momentum shift that can occur when everything starts clicking, but it also veers the action heavily to the arcade side of the fence.
However, like many UFC stars past and present, the in-Octagon performance isn’t the problem – it’s everything that happens outside of the fights. The M rating affords more blood in the cage, but it’s more often used to listen to (mostly) uncensored rap and nu metal songs on repeat in the poorly optimized menus. You still have access to all the modes of recent games; I enjoyed putting together my dream fight card, setting up a one-night tournament like the early days of the promotion, or pulling off fantasy matchups between two legends in their primes, but I’m always drawn to the longer-form experiences.
UFC 6 touts two distinct career modes, but unfortunately, both fall flat. The standard career mode features the same loop as past games: You sign to fight a specific opponent, then manage your week-by-week bandwidth by completing a combination of sparring and promotional activities. However, this quickly becomes repetitive, as you complete the same few activities multiple times per fight with a career spread across 30-plus fights. You can simulate some of the activities you’ve already completed, but you get fewer benefits, and with all the promotional activities simply being menu items you select, it doesn’t take long for the tedium to set in.
Even the new player-agency elements fall woefully short of expectations, giving you occasional binary choices that range from how you trash-talk to whether you want to fall for your coach’s get-rich-quick scheme. These feel inconsequential at best and outright annoying at worst; by the end of the first couple of years, I was hoping to change camps like in past games, but that is one area of player agency that’s missing. Normally, I’m glued to this mode with each new entry, but since I’ve played all previous UFC games, UFC 6’s career mode quickly gave me an unshakeable sensation of “been there, done that.”
It’s perhaps why I was so hopeful for The Legacy, a narrative-driven twist on career, where you take control of a fictional UFC prospect. This mode, with its M-rated story and promise of fights that spill outside of the Octagon, has a ton of potential, but once you get past the short, forgettable story, it’s just the standard career mode without your custom fighter. After seeing the story through to the end, you can continue playing career mode as the narrative’s protagonist, but I left The Legacy shortly after its narrative conclusion, likely never to return.
The one UFC 6 mode that impressed me is the Hall of Legends, a new interactive museum that highlights three current UFC fighters. Walking around a lovingly crafted museum themed after Max Holloway’s home of Hawaii or one that pays homage to Zhang Weili’s Chinese origin in third person delivers a cool immersive experience, giving you bite-sized documentaries of each fighter and tasking you with re-creating iconic moments from their careers in-game. It’s here that the dev team’s love of the sport really shines, but when there are only three fights to relive per fighter, and the documentary footage seems to be all repurposed from past UFC content, I was left wanting more.
Instead, the one area that feels completely excessive and largely unnecessary is perhaps the most baffling: The Gym. This area serves as a menu-based training system, where you navigate some of the laggiest and most unwieldy screens to assign trainers to fighters to arbitrarily unlock cosmetic items. It almost serves as a chart-your-own-path daily login bonus, with each new level for every fighter unlocking new items to equip, but it all feels so tiresome and unnecessary. In fact, the menus throughout the entire UFC 6 package are so laggy that they bring the menu-heavy experiences of The Gym and both career modes down in noticeable ways. In some cases, they’re so poorly optimized that the music even skips as the next screen loads.
UFC 6’s incremental gameplay improvements and bewildering stagnation fly in the face of the fact that it’s been three years since the last entry in the series. With annualized sports franchises, you almost expect iterative innovations year after year, but after such a long wait, I expected a bigger bump with UFC 6. The improved character models, graphics, and fighter distinctions are welcome improvements, but when almost everything else feels so familiar or inessential, I can’t help but wonder if EA Sports’ UFC franchise has experienced too much time uncontested at the top.