Photo gallery: Def Jam: Fight For NYI've got to be the first to admit it -- when EA announced a year or so back that they were developing a Rap-based wrestling game, my inner game fan shuddered, and not just a little. It seemed like such a disaster waiting to happen, a title that couldn't possibly serve either fans of wrestling games or rap music well. Reluctantly, I had to put my shuddering aside and review Def Jam: Vendetta, and I was somewhat blown away by what EA had managed to pull out of what is and was a rather unusual concept. Def Jam: Fight For NY is the follow-up to Vendetta -- can EA pull the same magic rabbit out of an oversized hoody again?
The answer's a reluctant yes. Don't get me wrong -- Def Jam: Fight For NY is an excellent fighting title with plenty of depth and customisation, and more Def Jam label artists than you can shake a turntable at. It even takes Japanese developer AKI's excellent grappling engine into new and interesting places, turning what should by rights be a wrestling game into more of a mixed martial arts game with disciplines like street fighting, submission fighting, wrestling and kickboxing thrown in for good measure. As good a game as it is, however, it's not without its flaws -- but more on that later.
Def Jam: Fight For NY picks up immediately where Vendetta left off, plot-wise. Underworld gang boss D-Mob is being driven away by the boys in blue, when suddenly out of nowhere a car rams into the cop car holding him, allowing him to escape. The driver of that car? That'd be you, keen to curry favour with D-Mob and enter the underground NY fighting scene. D-Mob takes you under his wing and into his private war with the forces of Crow (played by Snoop Dogg), and that means battles. Lots and lots of battles, with intermittent cut scenes that follow the game's relatively simple plot.
Unlike Vendetta, which offered you the choice of only four combatants with a set move list, Fight For NY gives you a surprising amount of customisation choice over your grappler, initially set out by getting the cops whose car you rammed to describe you to a sketch artist. At first, your choices are relatively minimal, but as you play through the game, extra clothing, haircuts, tattoos and the obligatory bling are made available to you. Your choice of designer duds -- over 600 individual pieces are available -- isn't just a purely aesthetic thing, as crowds will react more heartily to a flashy individual (this is a rap themed game, after all) than to someone fighting in an off-white pair of grungy Speedos.
Having chosen your fighter's visual look, you've also got to choose a style to start off with -- from Wrestling, Street fighting, Submission fighting, Kickboxing and Martial Arts. You're not just limited to one style either -- win enough development points and you can develop up to three styles. The styles you choose will determine not only your basic move set, but also which finishers are available to you, and which moves are likely to KO your foes. Unlike Vendetta, there's no way to pin an opponent -- not that pinning was ever the easy choice there. Fight For NY is purely a KO or submission game, and KOs are much easier than submissions to get. Having said that, even veterans of Vendetta and other AKI-engine games will find the early going in Fight for NY a touch harder than they might expect, and novices will want to pump the difficulty down lest they become disheartened early on.
Fight For NY's basic fighting engine isn't that much different from Vendetta's, save for the fact that it's much faster, its reversals engine is a little weaker -- emphasising attack over defence in most situations -- and your fighting environments are no longer limited to wrestling rings. Want to smack your opponents head into a concrete pillar? You can. Even those who don't like rap artists can get in on the action -- we've experienced few things so simply enjoyable as lifting Ice-T over our heads and slamming him repeatedly into a car windshield. Not that I would advocate that in real life, mind you.
As you progress through the game, you'll earn cash, which can be used on new hairstyles, tattoos, clothes and jewellery (provided by Jacob The Jeweller, every rap artiste's favourite, apparently) and development points, which can be used to raise your basic stats, learn new finishing moves (up to four can be in play at any one time) and learn new fighting styles. Fight For NY's styles selection works really well together -- if you start out with a wrestler you'll be limiting yourself to KOs based around grapples, but mix in a little street fighting and you'll have a grappler who can also swing mighty punches, and so on.
Aside from the game's story mode, there's also the usual options for up to four players to fight it out using any of the game's venues (that you've unlocked) and any of the game's fighters -- again, subject to whoever you've unlocked in the main single player mode.
If you're into Rap, you'll love Def Jam's assortment of characters, which includes Method Man, Snoop Dogg, Xzibit, Ludacris, Carmen Electra, Busta Rhymes, Ice-T, Lil Kim and even, oddly enough, Henry Rollins. Not every character plays 'themselves', but that doesn't mean you can't get enjoyment out of either becoming your favourite rap artist (or creating them in the game's story mode) or pummelling them down with the help of an audience-supplied iron bar. If there's one thing that Fight For NY has over Vendetta, it's brutality -- fighters bleed, and they should, given the amount of punishment you've got to dish out to win each fight.
As you'd expect, the game's cast of characters provides the background music for the game, accompanied by some very generic crowd sounds and scene specific commentary. If you like Def Jam label rap, you'll love, it, and if you don't, well, you know where the volume switch is.
All of this sounds like it should add up to a top-tier game, but there are some flaws in Fight For NY that should give you pause before you simply rush out and buy it. The game's single player mode is enjoyable and quite lengthy, but some of that length comes through a few storyline twists that simply serve to elongate the game, forcing you to beat foes you've already faced, and after a while, you may find that despite the majority of styles on offer, you fall into a few predictable fighting patterns to beat each foe, and it's at that point that the game's single-player longevity becomes something of a hindrance. If you're only playing Fight For NY in small bursts it's less of a worry, but those who sit and play in multi-hour sessions will certainly notice this.
Fight For NY offers multiplayer brawling, and that'd normally be a great inclusion to a game -- who doesn't enjoy beating down on their real-life friends in a virtual setting? Sadly, the game struggles with animating four players on screen at once, plus the backgrounds. On the PS2 version we tested with, there was some noticeable slowdown when working out what each fighter would do, but that wasn't the main problem with multiplayer. In order to keep each fighter onscreen, the game's camera pans out very, very wide indeed, and that makes judging strikes, kicks and grapples that much harder. In a game as fast as Fight For NY, it can be the difference between a rousing victory, and a future spent searching fruitlessly for your teeth in the gutter, in fact.
Def Jam: Fight For NY is a good game -- there's no doubt about that -- but it's perhaps that rarest of fighting games -- one that's better off played solo, or against one other player only, rather than in true multiplayer. It's more of a straight up fighting game this time around, rather than a grappler, so those whose tastes veer more in that direction might be better off picking up either the GameCube's WWE Day Of Reckoning (especially as the GameCube version of Fight For NY isn't available on Australian shores) , or the upcoming WWE: Smackdown Vs Raw. Gamers who enjoy a bit of old fashioned digital brutality wrapped up in the shiny gloss of the hip-hop underworld, however, should have a blast with Def Jam: Fight For NY.
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