Fight Night is one hell of a pretty game. The sound your glove makes as it crashes into your opponents skull with that last blow before dropping him to the hard mat, is nothing more then amazing. The feeling you get after crushing your friend with a nasty haymaker and replaying it over and over again as you taunt him is just uncanny. In a nut shell, Fight Night Round 3 is a boxing game that even non-boxing fans will love.

The game play is unique, and the actual act of punching/blocking/weaving are all mapped to the analogs in conjunction with the shoulder buttons. This creates an honest transition of the actual feeling of boxing, and eliminates for the most part button mashing (although the option to map punches to buttons can be turned on, they are just limited in their power.).

Campaign mode is a fun experience at first, but soon turns tedious and repetitive. You start out by either picking a real boxer and playing his career from scratch, or creating your own boxer and taking him up the ladder. You start with lower stats and as you progress and win matches, you make money that you can spend on better gear that grants you bonuses in specific categories.

In-between every match you are forced into three mini-games that alter your overall stats. You can choose between, weight lifting, combo dummy, and heavy bag. Each mini game will add points to certain aspects of your boxer’s stats while simultaneously negatively affecting others. For instance when you do combo dummy, your boxer gains five points in speed, but loses two points in strength. At first they’re decently fun, but after the tenth time of playing each, you’ll be itching to hit the auto-train button, despite the fact it greatly depletes your overall potential points that training session could earn you.

The more you play, and the more you learn how to actually control your boxer, the easier the game gets (I know that is pretty much a universal rule in gaming, but this is ridiculous). I’ve been playing the career mode on the highest level and consistently beat the computer within the first two rounds while barely breaking a sweat. This is due to the ridiculously powerful impact punches you can throw once you’ve mastered the analog punching controls. The only redeeming quality to these punches comes from inviting your friends over boasting you can knock then down in five punches, then doing it exactly in that many punches if not less. This creates a huge flaw in the game. It’s just too damn easy. The only real matches I ever get are with other players who have taken the time to truly learn the game.

Fight Night Round 3 still manages to excel at easily being the best boxing game ever made, and one of the best games in both the PS3 and 360 libraries. The learning curve is a little steep at first, and until you master it, the computer is actually quite challenging. If you can find the right opponent, then you’ll have hours of fun beating the snot out of one another. With the exception of some fairly large flaws, FNR3 still is an awesome game. Oh, did I mention its damn pretty too?