The Fight: Lights OutReview

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Mama said 'knock this game out'.

By Stephen Lambrechts

Since its release, early adopters of the PlayStation Move have been looking for new experiences tailored to mature and core audiences. The Fight: Lights Out is Sony's first real attempt to cater the PS Move towards these markets by providing violent and gritty bare-knuckle boxing action. Is this game a contender? Or is it destined to take a beating?

Starting with a fairly robust character-creation mode, the game immediately follows into a series of unintentionally-hilarious video tutorials hosted by none other than 'Machete himself', actor Danny Trejo. These videos manage to perfectly set the tone for everything else to come -- but not in a good way. From the gritty urban setting to an angry Trejo speaking as if he is passing a kidney stone, the game fails to muster any kind of edginess. It tries to be so tough, but watching Trejo teach you how to fight in an aggressively over-the-top way while waving hot pink and baby blue-lit PS Move controllers, makes it completely impossible to take seriously. The tutorial ends up being much more of a gut-buster than the fighting could ever hope to be. You'll be down for the count, but probably because you're rolling with laughter. These videos really are horrendously bad, recalling the days of the Sega CD at its very worst.

Exit Theatre Mode

After undertaking a laborious calibration process (which happens before every single fight), Trejo will take you step-by-step through all of the basics you will need to learn in order to handle yourself in a fight. These include moving your fighter, ducking and weaving, blocking and throwing punches. These are all fairly self-explanatory, aside from the need to press buttons for certain actions that really shouldn't need buttons. You'd think that blocking would be as simple as holding your dukes up towards your face, but many times we would lose calibration and would have to hold the O button on the PS Move to calibrate the fighter in the right direction again. This can feel extremely unnatural and it'll take some time to get used to pressing it before you think about throwing your hands up.

Throwing punches seems like something that'd work quite naturally with the PS Move controller. Unfortunately, this isn't the case. No matter how hard and fast you throw your punches, your on-screen counterpart moves with the speed and precision of a blindfolded senior citizen trying to whack a piñata. I kept finding that while some of the time my punches would hit their target, I'd also have a frustrating amount of my punches go way off the mark. It also doesn't help that even when your punches do connect, they are weak and ineffectual.

Moving your fighter involves holding down the Move button and tilting one of your Move controllers either to the sides or forward (Trejo's deadly serious demonstration of how this works is sensational). As the game requires you to stand in the same spot for the entirety of the fight, moving around at all will cause the camera to misplace you, making your punches even more inaccurate than they already are. Add to this the fact that most of opponents keep just walking backwards, or other classic fighting tactics, such as constantly walking around you in a circle and you will be spending much of the fight not punching with one hand because you're holding your controller forward in an effort to catch up.