Game Reviews

I've barely started playing Sony's gritty Move-enabled beat-'em-up and Danny Trejo is already shouting at me. "YOU'LL BREAK THE GAME IF YOU MOVE AROUND" he barks, his grizzled face looming at the screen like an angry testicle with a moustache.

As a way of defining the limitations of the hardware, it certainly guarantees your attention, even if it rather undermines the "Move" brand.

To be fair, Señor Trejo is talking about your feet. You need to stay in one spot for The Fight to work, but the rest of your body is free to move as much as you like. In fact, it's an absolute requirement – this is a genuinely punishing experience, forcing you to throw real weighty punches rather than the feeble Wii-flicks you may be used to from other motion sensing games.

In construction, it's basically Fight Night but with actual arm-flinging in place of thumbstick twizzles. You create a lumpy, cheap-looking digital mannequin and then try to elevate him through the ranks of underground bare-knuckle boxing, from crude scuffles under railway arches and freeway underpasses all the way up to the heady glamour of rusty cages and loosely organised bear-pit brawls. Expect to see it compared to Fight Club by people who don't understand Fight Club. Combat itself is, well, interesting. Just as digital imagery has been hampered the "uncanny valley" of human characters that are just inhuman enough to distract, so motion games are faced with their own awkward disconnect. There's just no getting away from the fact that too many motion games ask you to interact with intangible things, and the lack of sensory feedback feels weird and off-putting. It's no surprise that the motion games that generally work best are the ones where hitting or grabbing things isn't part of the gameplay.