Undisputed is the quintessential enthusiast videogame, where an industry outsider who just really likes something—pro boxing, in this case—takes it on themselves to make a game about that thing with all the elements they think it should include, regardless of what conventional game development wisdom may say.
In addition to our main Game of the Year Awards 2023, each member of the PC Gamer team is shining a spotlight on a game they loved this year. We'll post new personal picks, alongside our main awards, throughout the rest of the month.
The result is an early access boxing game with brutally complicated controls that, like real boxing matches, is just as liable to be boring as it is exciting. Even with time sped up, a fight that goes 12 rounds is a slog by the end. Absorbing body shots depletes a fighter's max stamina, so they can throw fewer and fewer punches at a time as the fight progresses. Eventually, all you can do is bat at your opponent in spurts, disengaging frequently to recover and desperately looking for a counter punch to knock them down.
In most fighting games, a match ends with one fighter leaping 80 feet into the air and suplexing the loser, or something along those lines. There's no superhuman jumping or suplexing in boxing, so that's off the table, but not even a dramatic knockout is guaranteed. You might just go the grueling distance and have the fight decided by scorecards. Sometimes it's a draw.
Undisputed is reminiscent of skateboarding sim Session: probably tedious to many, but catnip to a particular group of people who delight in seeing a certain element of the real world reverentially recreated digitally. It doesn't always lead to thrills, but being uncompromising is an attractive quality in a game regardless.
Undisputed is reminiscent of skateboarding sim Session: probably tedious to many, but catnip to a particular group of people.
Games are often praised for being "responsive" as if it's an inherent virtue, but as another example of that unwillingness to compromise, Undisputed is often intentionally unresponsive. If you're out of stamina, you can't dash out of danger, and your punches turn to spaghetti. Undisputed's insistence on simulating the physical realities of fighting also means that pressing a button to punch never guarantees you'll connect, even if you're in range. Hooks, for instance, can miss behind an opponent, your fighter's arm awkwardly wrapping around their neck. It's frustrating to press buttons that don't always do what you want them to do, but so it is for a boxer whose arms and legs don't always do what they want them to do.
Undisputed can of course be very exciting, especially when played against human opponents online. As Tyson Fury, I just KO'd another player's Muhammad Ali after 10 rounds during which I suffered two knockdowns myself. All those laborious survival rounds retroactively become the thrilling foundation for a glorious win.
Undisputed released in early access back in January, and it's still pretty early access-ey—career mode and custom fighters are still in development, despite a post that said they'd release this year—so I'd only recommend it to boxing fans who don't mind tooling around in a game that's truly under construction.
Even then, you've got to really want to play a boxing game to take the time to learn one with over 60 contextual punch varieties, but it's that uncompromising complexity that makes Undisputed my personal pick this year.
