Schedule management is a rather key element of the new Fight Night system. Boxers only have a limited amount of time and with resting and training, you have to pick your fights carefully. Pack in as many fights as you can a year and you’ll have less time to train; wait too long, and you could miss your window. That brings us to the subject of Fight Night training.

Now, mercifully gone from Round 4 are the training mini-games. These ludicrous exercises in button mashing have been replaced with… more button pushing, but at least it makes sense this time. Instead of playing training games that suck - frantically slapping your controller with misplaced rage as quickly as possible - you now have to do actual boxing training drills - which are equally irritating. The drills in Fight Night are meant to teach you boxing fundamentals and give you a better understanding of the game, which they do, but after playing a few, I’m back in the “I’ll take 50% less points and just hit auto-train” camp. I’m going to chalk this up to impatience and lacking the desire to have a “real boxing experience,” which some people do want. I love Call of Duty games and their settings, but I’ve never wanted to dig a trench or pull KP duty.

Now, after you do all of your chores and juggle what needs to get done, you can start fighting. This is where my initial frustration set in. The first few fights went as expected. I would run out of the corner swinging like crazy and eventually knock the guy out. Go team! This worked for a little while, giving me a false sense of power. YES! I would be the one true champion! Then the sweet, sweet science taught me a harsh lesson: if you never block and tire yourself out, you are going to get creamed eventually. In my case, four naughty word spouting, controller throwing times in a row. It might take a while, but eventually, in the later ranks, people are going to start cleaning your clock if you don’t learn the intricacies of boxing. This lesson almost made me quit the game in disgust, and curse its name in the hallowed pages of GameShark, but I’m glad I didn’t.

You see, when games look as good as the Fight Night series, they don’t always have a complex game holding them up. (I’d like to point you to Crysis.) That’s where Fight Night Round 4 surprised me. In the previous version, defense wasn’t REALLY that important. I’m pretty sure I won most of my fights by wailing on my right hook and being good at the weightlifting game. That’s not the case this time. Round 4 is a much more rewarding experience if you take the time to study opponents and learn different techniques to defeat them. Whereas Fight Night Round 3 was pure action, Fight Night Round 4 borders on strategy gaming.

Each fighter, once in the ring, has 3 important stat meters – Health, Stamina and Block. Health and Stamina are pretty straightforward, as one is your physical constitution while the other is how “winded” your fighter becomes, which effects the power level of his punches. The block statistic takes into account how long a fighter has been blocking and the strength of that block. The longer a block is held, the lower the coverage will slide, as well as being lowered by blocked punches, until more punches are getting through than being deflected. Each hit has a chance to break through that block and do a bit of glancing damage. This way, if you fight a “turtle,” you have a chance to make him drop his hands to recharge his block.

The new punching system, while similar to the old system, is a bit more fluid in movement. I absolutely hated it at first - too many punches require Street Fighter-esque stick movements to execute while others are incredibly simple. Fighting became a frantic exercise in slamming the analog sticks back and forth until someone fell down, but as the game continued, I learned to appreciate the new scheme and, eventually, came to really like it. It also helps that the loading screen includes boxing tips, which, trust me on this one, you’ll have plenty of time to read while waiting for your fight to load. This is definitely a candidate for hard drive installation.