Undisputed

Undisputed was provided by Deep Silver for review. Thank you!

Undisputed makes it clear right out of the gate that this is a game for those who are really into their boxing. The fighting is designed to be nuanced and will overwhelm anyone unfamiliar with boxing. As will the menus, with many stats looking more like a management game than your regular sports game. If you aren't into your boxing, I wouldn't even recommend continuing with reading this review, but if you are, you are in the right place.

Undisputed gets you started by placing you in a practice ring to run you through your paces with a combat tutorial. It all starts fairly easy, talking you through moving around the ring with the left thumbstick before going into how to throw basic punches by jabbing the right thumbstick in certain directions. Jabbing the left thumbstick to dodge, pressing down the left thumbstick and jabbing it to slip, pressing the right thumbstick near your opponent to clinch, holding RT to block, holding RT and LB to body block, holding LT and left thumbstick to weave, then you have power attacks, stance changes, feints, headbutts.

There is a lot to learn in a very short amount of time. Even after running through the tutorial and starting up a career mode, I lost my first 3 fights before taking a break, given how frustrated I was with the game.

I couldn't tell if it was my lack of skill or just the way the game is, but everything felt rather slow, I can't say I watch boxing matches in real life, but from what I have seen, the swing of punches is usually very fast, and dare I say, somewhat precise. In Undisputed, it feels like even the fastest punches take half a second to connect, and once you've run out of stamina after 3 punches, your character moves at half the speed, which is just painfully slow.

In the end, for most of the matches, I ended up getting close to my opponent, wildly wiggling the right thumbstick back and forth to do left and right punches, and then backing off once my stamina was low, making vague attempts to block incoming punches if I saw them. I know this isn't how the game is intended to be played, but doing any form of "tactical" movement and strategic punching just seemed to get me KO'd even faster and barely put a dent in my opponent's health/stamina.

So, the combat wasn't my cup of tea. It seemed like it was trying to be a simulation with how complicated all the controls are. It also gave you 5 different options to protect yourself from attacks, which I had no idea how to read to know which to use. Sadly, the simulation-like controls didn't really match up to the gameplay, in my opinion, and it left you with a sluggish and unresponsive feeling game.

The career mode will most likely be where you spend most of your time, where you can build your character to become a champion or select from an existing famous IRL boxer to play as. Either way, you'll need to build up your team around you, train yourself, and improve your stats as you climb the world rankings.

This part of the game seems fine; you can hire a coach, cutman, and manager to handle your training, injuries, and contracts, and you can choose your training regiment to focus on which stats you want to improve. It's quite in-depth and it seems like if boxing is your thing, you'd probably have some fun specializing your skills into how you want to play. If only all of this wasn't training for the combat in this game...

Regardless, you'll be able to organize fights with other famous boxers that you'll recognize and fight across a variety of arenas. It can get a little repetitive, as this is boxing, and each fight is pretty similar. Although your opponents do seem to have slightly different personalities and tactics, some fighters are definitely more aggressive.

This brings us to the one area where I think Undisputed doesn't disappoint: the variety of content. Undisputed features over 100 real-life boxers from multiple weight classes and men's and women's boxing. It also features 19 different arenas to fight in, ranging from more personal gym environments to outdoor arenas and big indoor stages with spotlights and crowds.

You can't fault Undisputed for that amount of variety. If you're playing in the "quick fight" mode instead of the career mode, you can modify things such as the amount of damage dealt and the amount of stamina you have, making fights more interesting.

Visually, the game doesn't disappoint either. While I couldn't run on high settings on the Steam Deck, the game still looked appealing. You can see some details on the characters, such as more specular details on characters when they sweat, the reddening of the skin as the battle goes on, ripples on the characters' bodies when they take a punch, and the bruises and blood that you might expect. The environments also look varied and up to scratch.

So, Undisputed isn't a game for me with its overly complex fighting mechanics and oddly sluggish feeling gameplay, but if you have been starved of a boxing game and you want to try out a modern one with good graphics and fairly deep mechanics, then Undisputed should be a game that you look into for yourself.

Undisputed - Steam Deck Performance

Sadly, Undisputed does not support 16:10 aspect ratio resolutions, so the best resolution on our Steam Deck here is 1280x720, which means we get some black bars above and below the screen. The game does have good controller support.

Performance isn't too great on the Steam Deck. You can run the game at 30 FPS with some settings turned up, but with the game already feeling sluggish, playing at 30 FPS just made it feel even worse. Also, I found that having VSync enabled caused some pretty odd frame rate issues, with the game getting stuck at 27 FPS quite often, so we have to forego that.

As a side note, Undisputed requires an internet connection for your first boot of the game, although subsequent boots can be done offline.

Recommended Settings - 40 FPS

In SteamOS, you'll want to apply a Frame Rate Limit of 40 and no TDP Limit.

In the in-game graphics settings, you'll want a resolution of 1280x720, disable V-Sync, and set your game framerate limit to anything; it doesn't really matter. The menu framerate limit should be 60 or above; do not select 30, as in my case, it limited the game to 30 as well, not just the menus.

Set anti-aliasing to Low, Shadow Quality to Very Low, Texture Resolution to Low, and Post-Processing to Low. Motion Blur is optional, although I left it on in these tests.

Visually, the game still looks fine on these settings, and it will hold 40 FPS well on some arenas. However, do expect some slowdowns to the low 30s on certain arenas.

If the slowdowns get to you, you can enter the "game" tab in options and lower the Crowd Density setting. If you have this on 0%, you can run most arenas at a fairly stable 40 FPS, but you do lose a fair bit of ambiance.

The game also uses an enormous amount of RAM. On Ultra settings, RAM+VRAM usage combined exceeded 20GB and caused severe issues. This is one of the reasons we keep all the settings at the lowest, including texture detail, which often has no direct impact on performance.

Power draw varies quite a lot in the game. It hovers around 15-20W for many matches, but some matches, depending on the arena, can reach 25W. This is primarily in arenas with many crowds, so reducing the Crowd Density setting can help here.

As expected, temperatures varied along with power draw, with 75-80C being the most common range. However, in the more intensive arenas, temperatures can go beyond 80C. At these points, the fan does become loud.

Accessibility:

The only accessibility options in Undisputed are the ability to disable various flashing elements in the game for those with photosensitivity and disable camera shake/tilt to avoid motion sickness.

Conclusion:

Undisputed is an unapologetically complex fighting game. With controls that will take some getting used to and AI that will proceed to beat you down until you get used to them, this isn't a game for everybody. But if you are looking for a boxing game and you've been starving for a good one for some time, Undisputed is at least worth giving a chance and seeing if it's the one for you.

The performance on Steam Deck is a little disappointing. We have to run at the lowest graphical settings to get the game up to 40 FPS, which is the minimal "playable" frame rate. Even then, we get dips close to 30 FPS on some arenas without removing all of the crowd. Undisputed can be played on the Steam Deck, but it's far from the best way to play it.

Our review is based on the PC version of this game.

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