by:	December 30, 2004

Fight Club the game seems like a good enough idea, despite the book and the movie’s anti-consumerism ideals, the title itself is perfect to turn into gaming merchandise. The sad thing is, it is the product of exactly what Tyler Durden despises, the absolute perfect example of shameless merchandising. Fight Club does not help to introduce new ideology into the Fight Club mythos, nor does it seem like the author of the book Fight Club approved this game. The game is loosely based off of the 1999 movie made by FOX, but strangely is published by Vivendi-Universal. Fight Club is the perfect example of what goes wrong when you merchandise the wrong properties from its music, graphics, and gameplay, this is a complete failure of a package.

When you first start up the title you are treated to menu systems that are fairly well executed, and revolve around the dingy house from the movie. You begin story mode as a unknown character you name yourself and can have three basic fighting styles—brawler, martial arts, or grappler. These are the only fighting styles in the game, and either fighting style you use you can still use the same button combinations to win. When going through the story mode it may be difficult at first to figure out what to do. Then you realize you can win every single fight by simply punching a few times as quickly as possible (before the AI opponent does the same move over and over again), and throw them down. Throwing them down you can rapidly press buttons to punch at them and take out a lot of their life in what seems to be an unfair matter. Half of the fights you don’t even have to totally complete, just prove that you are able to fight. What gets me is, at one point you are fighting in a restaurant that apparently has 50 square feet of cleared space just so you can fight. Last I checked Fight Club fights only happened in festering holes. As you go through the story mode you get a totally cheesy back-story that loosely follows Tyler Durden’s exploits until you get to the ending. To be fair the ending depicts the ending of the movie pretty good, but you are then become upset that beating the game unlocks Limp Bizkit’s lead singer Fred Durst. What is even more annoying is he is the most detailed fighter in the game.

The most innovative thing about the title is the online mode and that is even somewhat plain. You can create a character, with very limited customization options (oh I can choose from five colors of jeans—yipee!). Interestingly enough though, if you play online under Hardcore mode, if you take to many hits you break your bones and can’t fight anymore, or you can tap out. Either way later you can buy medicine to heal your wounds from points you earned in the game’s various modes. To do that though you would have to actually find someone playing the game online. In the week I played this game, I could not find one person playing online, and the game isn’t that old, so in the future it seems unlikely that the Live mode will have any uses at all.

The titles visuals are were it does best at but even with that, the visuals aren’t as consistent or good as other fighters. The character models have a certain shine and defined look to them similar to the models of the ill-faded Xbox exclusive fighter Kakuto Chojin. Even so they still aren’t as detailed, and most models are just the same torso and pants with slightly different colors. The character models however bruise up realistically, and close up you can see their facial expressions and body marks such as freckles and moles. Strangely the developers put major emphasis on Robert Paulson’s “man-breast” and they even giggle around a bit, luckily he is wearing a shirt. The character movements are still fairly stiff and the environments are sort of boring to look at. You will get the occasional dumpster or box to bump into and interact with, and the occasional realistic water puddle or wet reflection but these are very basic of details. They do have characters in the background cheering on but they do nothing to enhance the experience. The most interesting thing about the graphics are when you break someone’s bones it replays it back in a X-Ray vision that shows you the cracking of the bones. The worst however is undoubtedly the cut scenes, which are horribly created still pictures that don’t even match up with the in-game models at all. Besides that you have your basic versus and survival modes, which will be about twenty minutes of entertaining button mashing until you get tired of it.

The entire sound effects and soundtrack package is sub par at best. When you begin playing the game the first song you hear is from Limp Bizkit, and the whiney lyrics of the front man Fred Durst totally clash with the somewhat mellow and techno beats from the movie. Luckily there are some beats from the actual movie from the likes of Dust Brothers, but after that the music trails off into bad rip-offs and heavy metal music such as KoRn and Limp Bizkit that have no place in the game. The amazing thing is you can download more horrid music off of Xbox Live. Luckily you can use your own tracks if you want to. The voice acting in the game is either people trying to hard to sound like Brad Pitt and Edward Norton, or a bunch of undistinguished voices that sound like they never had any voice acting lessons with forced swearing and expression. The actual fights have a lot of the same bumps, smacks and cracks for all the moves. None of them sound very original and sound like the basic tracks you would hear for a fighting game. The most annoying problem with the sound in the game is, the winner of a match will taunt the other player and you will see his mouth move, but nothing comes out.

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Fight Club the game, is not either a good representation of the Fight Club book, Fight Club movie, or the fighting game genre. It will not hold any value for any fighting fans even if you find it in the bargain bin, and Fight Club fans everywhere should especially stay away from this skid mark in the fighting game genre.

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