• Posted August 5th, 2010 at 10:02 EDT by Steven Williamson
• 7 Comments

Now here’s a genre that should be a perfect match for PlayStation Move. Imagine being able to step into the body of a fighter, ducking and diving and then throwing an uppercut followed by a flurry of left and right jabs before landing a sucker punch to knock your opponent spark out. That’s really what we hoped to see with The Fight: Lights Out , which has been specifically built from the ground up to take advantage of Sony’s motion-sensing peripheral. We hoped for a game that made us feel like we are actually there in the ring.

The Fight: Lights Out consists of a series of underground, bare-knuckle fights against twelve opponents and big bosses who you’ll have to defeat if you hope to get crowned champ. Along the way, you train your fighter in a number of disciplines, including speed and power and customise him as you see fit choosing in which areas you want to improve on. 

Early signs aren’t great. In the arena, the gameplay doesn’t utilise the true 1:1 precision that Move is capable of so your movements aren’t replicated exactly on-screen. This makes it feel quite Wii-like. In fact moving your body doesn’t make any difference at all, it’s all about how you move the two Move controllers that control your fists. You can hold them up to your face to block and then move from side to side to dodge. Bring the right-hand controller high and swipe it from your right to execute a left jab to the face and vice versa for a left jab. Similarly, you can aim low either side for a body shot. There’s no in-between, it’s either high shots or low shots. However, you do get a chance to pull off some entertaining moves, such as the head-butt by thrusting the controller into your chest and then swiftly outwards.

The problem is that it all feels quite slow and sluggish. This may change with further training on the speed discipline, but we fought with two big guys in the ring and we had to execute slow and measured punches. It was very difficult to string together combos, and you certainly weren't able to let fly with a flurry of Rocky-style punches. As such, it was kind of like watching two obese kids fighting in the schoolyard. 

This was a mere snippet of the full game so the experience may change, but our expectations are now fairly low because we were quite bored playing The Fight: Lights Out. While we've no doubt that Move will one day possess a great boxing game,  we highly doubt this will be it.