EA Sports UFC 6 Review – A More Well-Rounded Fighter That Still Pulls Some Punches

The UFC has long been the red-headed stepchild of the EA Sports roster, as the games only come out every two years, and the last couple of entries have been pretty lightweight in terms of content. Well, EA Sports UFC 6 is here (just in time for the sport to debut on the White House lawn of all places), and this time around, EA Vancouver is promising a more muscular update.

Does EA Sports UFC 6 finally put this franchise in title contention? Or does the series still have some holes in its game? Tape up your fists, it's time to find out.

Much like its predecessor, the first thing that will likely grab your attention upon booting up EA Sports UFC 6 is just how good this game looks. Pound-for-pound, this may be the prettiest sports game on the market, as almost every fighter looks remarkably true to life, and let me tell you, capturing the unique battle-scarred mugs of the likes of Max Holloway and Islam Makhachev can’t have been an easy task.

The fighters don't just look good; their movement is strikingly realistic as well, with everyone having their own unique animations and cloth and hair reacting and contorting in realistic ways. Meanwhile, UFC 6's new "real-time contact" makes striking feel less canned than before, with limbs colliding in realistic ways and even shots from odd angles "counting." Sure, there's still the occasional wonky moment where legs and arms end up in an improbable tangle, or someone collapses to the canvas in a way that would break their spine, but 95 percent of the time, the action looks shockingly believable (and bloody: the gore returns in a big way this year).

EA Sports UFC 6 largely sticks to the fundamentals established by the series’ last few entries in terms of core gameplay, albeit with an additional level of polish and precision. The four face buttons are your right and left punches and kicks, and they can be modified by combining them with the shoulder buttons. There is a wide variety of attacks you can unleash, from standard jabs, hooks, calf kicks, and clinch attacks to more dramatic flying knees and spin kicks. You can't just button-mash either; paying attention to your stamina, proper spacing, blocking, and head movement is key to winning against higher-level opponents.

The mat game plays out almost identically as it did in UFC 5, with players having the option to control grappling manually with a combination of button and directional inputs or turn on Grapple Assist, which allows you to choose simple commands (Get Up, Ground and Pound, Submission, etc.) with the game’s AI deciding the best transitions. Grappling works well enough, but feels like the one part of this series’ core action that EA Vancouver hasn't entirely figured out yet. It just isn’t as fluid or adaptive as it should be.

The most significant gameplay innovation in UFC 6 is the new "Flow State" system, with each fighter having specific perks that confer passive bonuses and allow you to fill your Flow Meter by playing in a certain way. For instance, Max Holloway's main perk rewards head movement, filling up your Flow Meter if you sway out of the way of an opponent's punch, then rewarding you with a stronger counter-punch if you quickly fire back. Fill your Flow Meter and you can activate your Flow State, which lasts around 15 seconds and grants you extra power and more valuable perks. It feels like EA Vancouver have put quite a bit of thought into the Flow State system, but in practice, it's pretty much just your standard time-limited super mode. It's certainly not a bad addition, as it helps ensure fights don't drag on as long as they sometimes did in the past, but it's not hugely transformative.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about EA Sports UFC 6 is the amount of content it offers. After playing it conservatively for years, EA Vancouver rolls out multiple new ways to play this time around, including an actual story mode, "The Legacy." As the title implies, the game puts you in the shoes of fictional fighter Chris Carter, a legacy athlete whose dad was an Olympic medalist. It's your fairly standard rags-to-riches story, complete with a salty trainer and friend-turned-rival, but the level of presentation is really quite impressive. Between the story bits, The Legacy occasionally serves up some unique gameplay opportunities, including an unexpected bar fight, but most of the time it’s just an introduction to Career Mode. That’s fine, but a bit more could have been done to extend the flashiness of The Legacy’s cutscenes to its actual gameplay.

You can also jump into the standard Career mode with a real-world UFC star or your own hideous created fighter. Things haven't changed a whole lot here -- before each showdown, you’re given several virtual weeks to prepare, during which you can spar, watch tape on your opponent, learn new moves, and engage in PR stunts. Your character grows and develops based on what kind of sparring sessions you choose to engage in and the moves you unleash during fights, allowing you to craft your fighter in a semi-organic way.

It all works well enough, but it’s also rather sluggish as you spend quite a bit more time preparing for every bout than you do actually fighting. You could argue that's how MMA actually works, but in this case, the realism isn't really to the game's benefit. UFC 6 does provide more opportunities to choose how you want to train and handle your career -- usually presented as text messages from your trainer that require some sort of multiple-choice decision -- but you'll still spend an inordinate amount of time on the same few dry, repetitive training activities.

The other big UFC 6 addition is the Hall of Legends, essentially a first attempt at doing something like the WWE 2K series' Showcase mode. Hall of Legends focuses on three of the UFC's biggest current stars, Max Holloway, Alex Pereira, and Zhang Weili, with each receiving a somewhat odd, but lovingly made, museum of sorts that you can actually walk around and interact with. You can also play through a small handful of iconic matches from the careers of each fighter, and thankfully, unlike WWE 2K, UFC 6 doesn’t overfocus on forcing players to complete an endless list of finicky objectives. The Hall of Legends feels a touch underdeveloped now, but there's definitely a lot of potential for the mode to grow in future entries.

The online features on offer haven't been updated much this year, with the expected Quick Fight, Ranked Play, and Online Career options, although crossplay is finally a thing this time around. While the UFC 6 online experience is certainly more stable at launch than the last game in the series, matches can still feel a bit sluggish, with noticeable latency at times. I also got disconnected mid-match a few times.

For all its features, EA Sports UFC 6 is also notable for what it doesn't contain. There’s still no card-collecting Ultimate-Team-style mode and no microtransaction-pushing hub world, and frankly, I'm not going to complain about their absence. Fight Week, which allows you to win in-game currency by predicting the results of real UFC events, returns, but it's largely harmless, as your earned coins can only be spent on cosmetics. UFC 6 is an efficient fighter, focusing on meaningful additions rather than wasting energy on filler.

This review was based on a PS5 copy of EA Sports UFC 6 provided by publisher Electronic Arts.

Follow Wccftech on Google to get more of our news coverage in your feeds.