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The Grind of Professional Fighting Becoming a professional fighter takes years of repetition, drilling techniques and training footwork until everything is instinctual. Your body needs an automatic answer for every limb, from every angle. In MMA, which encompasses every martial art, it’s even harder. Authentic Fighter Experience EA Sports’ UFC 6 realistically captures the grind of this brutal discipline. Throw on Career Mode and you spend most of your time working on combos and techniques. It’s all about making the complex controls feel second nature, increasing the effectiveness of every strike thrown by your fighter. With simulated six-week-long training camps between bouts, you can sometimes spar 12 times before a fight that could be over in a matter of seconds. The Fighting Itself Happily, the fighting itself is excellent. UFC games have had a bit of a rock-’em’-sock-’em quality to them, but this latest instalment does a great job at creating more natural animations, flowing beautifully between the different levels submissions, wrestling, and stand-up — of an MMA fight. It looks almost worryingly realistic, too. From the pores on their skin to the wrinkles on the soles of their feet, these character models are the most detailed I’ve seen in a sports fighter. The Legacy Story Mode A welcome new addition is The Legacy, a story mode that mythologises the rise of an up and coming fictional wrestler who’s trying to escape the shadow of his famous father, while brewing up a rivalry with another prospect at the same gym. It’s fully acted-out melodrama, your very own Rocky story, shining a light on how violence occasionally spills outside the Octagon and stains careers; inbetween fights, you attend press conferences and respond to provocations on social media. Conclusion Between the fluid fighting and the story-mode razzmatazz, this is the best version yet of EA’s fight-sim series. UFC 6 is out now; £69.99