I played UFC 2009 Undisputed for Xbox 360 for about 8 hours today, so I’m taking a break and writing down my impressions so far.

My first thoughts as I fired up the game is that it takes a different presentation route then expected after playing the demo. Rather then focusing on you playing as an actual UFC fighter when in Career mode, it makes you create a new fighter from scratch and begins the story line with you in the last fight of an Ultimate Fighter season. From there you work your way up the ranks in Ultimate Fight Nights before making it to the main UFC events.

The career mode is decent but there are some annoying aspects to it. You basically have a different activity you can engage in from week to week leading up to a fight. You can train physical attributes (strenght, speed, cardio) or spar with a partner to increase your skill in various techniques, for example: Striking Offense, Striking Defense, Submission Offense, Submission Defense, etc. It is all decently done but the menu system can be a bear to navigate through. The worst part is the “Email” system, which I have never seen done right in any videogame. You get messages from various characters in the game informing you of different events or requests. I just ignore them now and focus on the other tasks. After a few weeks your fights comes up, you fight, and then repeat the process again. I went through about 9 fights in career mode before getting a title shot. The fights are decently hard, I think Matt Hughes beat me down about 6 times before I finally put him to sleep with a high kick to the head.

Even though I won the title after 3-4 hours of gameplay there are achievement incentives to win the title in all weight classes, which adds a significant amount of replay value to the game. There are also a number of Xbox Live related achievements that add to the replay value. There are achievements from winning a set number of matches going from 1 to 100, which isn’t an unreachable number. There should be a significant amount of gameplay in this title if you hit the achievements and online play.

Speaking of online play, I started the game up at about 10:45 AM on release day, and there was already someone with a record of 142-1. There were a number of other people above 100 wins as well. The game had only been officially out for about 11 hours. I did a little investigation and found on the official UFC 2009 forums that this was a known issue because advance copies of the game had gone out weeks in advance with online play enabled. THQ apparently decided to not do a reset of the ladders, so I guess the whole idea of fair play went out the window on that one. Also there seems to be a wee problem with people quitting before losses are registered, a common yet simple problem to fix that has existed in online games since their inception.

The online play itself is pretty fun. There was a good deal of lag in some matchups but for the most part it wasn’t a huge problem. In my time playing I went 8-6. It looks like if you want to get really good then you need to go all out grappling/submission, wrestling seems especially strong if used correctly. There is a randomness to some of the knockouts that is out of your control but it doesn’t get out of hand.

In the end, the UFC 2009 demo unsurprisingly showcased the best part of the game, in the ring fighting. The career mode is average, but the game shines when the fighters are in the cage.

Here is a clip showcasing the ground game in UFC 2009, get good at it if you want to win online :)