Undisputed review: hardcore boxing simulation lacks the fun of Fight Night

The most authentic boxing game ever isn’t the knockout hit we wanted

Undisputed / Deep Silver

You can tell Undisputed is made by people who live and breathe boxing. From throwing your first punch in a lengthy tutorial taking you through dozens of different moves and button combinations, this is as sophisticated a sports simulation as you can get. Unfortunately, that doesn’t result in a great game.

It’s the biggest boxing game since 2010’s Fight Night Champion, with a spectacular roster of past and present superstars. You can pit Tyson Fury against Muhammad Ali, Sugar Ray Robinson against Rocky Marciano, Joe Frazier against Oleksandr Usyk, or Terrance Crawford against Ricky Hatton. There are a few notable omissions, like Anthony Joshua, Dimitry Bivol, Naoya Inoue and Gervonta Davies, but the roster will have boxing scholars salivating regardless.

Undisputed / Deep Silver

All of them are lavishly detailed, the spitting image of their real-world counterparts. That goes for their boxing styles too, many of the big names having their own unique animation. No one else in the game throws a snapping jab like Usyk, bobs and weaves like Ali, or launches lightning left hooks like Jones Jr. It’s uncanny seeing Fury’s characteristic herky-jerky movement replicated in a video game.

When the bell rings, however, Undisputed legs go from under it. Punches simply lack impact. Similar to EA’s UFC 5, which released in 2023, you feel like you’re fighting underwater. You can only throw punches for about ten seconds before running out of stamina and having your strikes slow to less than half speed, which looks ridiculous. This robs explosiveness from encounters.

Read more: EA Sports UFC 5 review: the strongest online MMA game ever released

That’s a shame, because visually it’s incredible. Whether reeling off a series of body blows that send rolls of fat rippling from the epicenter of the impact, or catching your opponent’s chin with a crunching uppercut and watching flecks of blood collect on your gloves, Undisputed is better observed than played. It sorely needs a slow-mo replay feature to really appreciate the attention to detail. 

Undisputed / Deep Silver

Its main failing, though, is unresponsiveness. Animations trigger a second after your input, resulting in a game that feels more like you’re queuing up moves than reacting in the heat of the moment. You flick the left stick to dart backwards, then a second later, your fighter moves. You press the button to jab, and a second later, out comes your attack. It’s slow and cumbersome, like trying to park a semi-trailer truck while getting punched in the face.

In developer Steel City’s defense, this unresponsiveness is unavoidable. Boxers in the game move like boxers, not Street Fighter characters. They have weight and momentum. If you want lifelike characters with realistic human movement, they’re not going to react in a single frame. To move to the left, you push off from your right foot. Throw a combo and you’ll have to wait for your arms to reset before following up with more. Delay is built into the sport.

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Undisputed looks like boxing, therefore, but doesn’t feel like boxing. This is geared for enthusiasts, the Assetto Corsa to Fight Night’s Burnout Revenge. You’ll use a mix of face buttons and the sticks for both offensive and defensive maneuvers, but with a long list of modifiers and combinations, it’s not immediately accessible. 

Undisputed / Deep Silver

For instance, holding RB and a face button changes your punch from a standard one to a power punch, which is more damaging but saps stamina. Holding LT, meanwhile, redirects your punches from the opponent’s head to their body. Slipping attacks requires clicking the left stick while angling it in a direction. Controls are exhaustive.

This doesn’t mean they’re precise. Boxing is a game of inches, of slipping punches by a hair’s width, yet it’s impossible to capture that precision in a boxing game where you’re relying on a small plastic stick to move around. This results in punches missing because you’re a little too far away, or getting smothered because you’re a little too close, when practically there’s not a lot you can do about either.

Every move a boxer has at their disposal is a move you have at yours. You can change stances, clinch, and headbutt. You might choose to float around the outside and slip punches using flicks of the left stick, or shell up and absorb them with a high guard before responding with a barrage of your own. Range matters too. If you throw a punch from too close, it’ll get stifled. Such is the advanced physics, you can actually get your arms tangled with your opponent. There’s impressive depth to Undisputed. 

Undisputed / Deep Silver

If only it felt good to play. That one-second delay impacts everything, from crouching to countering, and it’s unavoidable. Instead of reading your opponent and slipping their punches, you have to slip before they’ve moved, because by the time they do, it’ll be too late. 

There are modifiers in the menu, however, and these help you make the experience slightly more bearable. Upping your damage and stamina results in a slightly faster-paced, heavier-hitting game. It’s nearer to what Undisputed should have been in order to truly capture boxing in video game form, but it still doesn’t go far enough. 

You can’t, for instance, seem to score a flash knockout with a lucky punch. It’s all about wearing your opponent down through pitter-patter blows, which is vastly less exciting. After tinkering with the modifiers, throwing a combo still rapidly depletes your stamina, even in the first ten seconds of a fight. Professional boxers should be able to punch for more than ten seconds without getting winded.

Mode-wise there’s the exhibition, prizefights which give you weekly fantasy bouts to try, and career, the latter revealing the true extent of the developer’s boxing passion. You’ll assemble a team and rise through the boxing ranks from amateur tournament winner to arena-packing superstar, winning officially licensed belts from the WBC, WBO, and IBF. 

Undisputed / Deep Silver

From hand-picking opponents that suit your style to striking the right balance in fight camp between fitness and recovery, this is a game that lives and breathes boxing. Even the man who fixes up your cuts between rounds is modeled after a real guy, the legendary Jacob ‘Stitch’ Duran. 

There are details that could only have been thought up by proper boxing fans. For instance, if you don’t stay on top of your weight, you can actually get too fat and force a fight cancellation. You can also negotiate deals by choosing your percentage of the fight purse, your media obligations, and whether the venue is local, which gives you a boost in stats. After the initial novelty, however, these details show themselves to be gimmicks.

Your proposals are often rejected as unfavorable, so it’s quicker and easier just to accept the first offer. Fight camps, meanwhile, feel largely meaningless when they’re all executed via menu screens and contribute a few stat points onto your skills, which you’ll struggle to notice during the fights themselves. You can devote time to posting on social media and increasing your fame, but it simply makes a meter go up. You don’t get the sense you’re actually raising your profile in the boxing world.

Undisputed / Deep Silver

You will need to be massively enthusiastic about boxing to get anything out of Undisputed. It’s an incredibly comprehensive simulacrum of the sport developed by people who clearly know their stuff, but that doesn’t translate into a satisfying video game. Despite admirable authenticity, fights are unresponsive, cumbersome, and ultimately frustrating. After a decade and a half without a decent boxing game, Undisputed doesn’t deliver the knockout hit.

There’s a saying in the sport: you don’t play boxing. It’s a serious sport with dire consequences. Undisputed treats it the same way - it forgets it’s a video game. 

Score: 5/10

Platform tested: PC