The first rule about Fight Club is you don’t talk about Fight Club …

Sage advice, but perhaps wiser advice may have been not to make a game called Fight Club that pays lip service to the motion picture, but it merely is an excuse for endless street fighting levels.

That may seem overly harsh, but when it comes to fighting games, the PlayStation 2 release by Vivendi Universal Games and Genuine Games of Fight Club is a disappointment. The game does feature some interesting new elements, like zooming in tight to give an x-ray view of bones breaking, but the animation is redundant at the end of each fight, and the storyboard of CGI scenes is disjointed.

The movie made some sense, if you were patient enough. The game is a simplified version of that. It is the quest of one fighter to find the leader (Tyler Durden, played by Brad Pitt in the motion picture) of the underground street fights known as Fight Club. Along the way he finds out about something else, Project Mayhem, but that is not really a focus of this game. It is just a progressive ploy to have your character travel from one area to the next, and fight in different environments.

The environments are not as important as the fights, and really matter little to fight scenarios. For instance, early in the progression, your created fighter takes on a person known as Angel Face in a basement filled to mid-shin with standing water. The water has no effect on the fight, nor does it have any seeming effect on its own environment. It just is there as static scenery. If your fighter gets planted on his back, and his head is underwater, there is nothing to indicate that there is danger associated with that.

And the targeting system is sluggish at best. If your opponent in the single-player story game moves, you may end up facing at an angle away from the fighter, or with your back to him, and you will turn very slowly back to center on him.

The game also has some clipping problems. If in a defensive stance, to block the attack, any thing that your opponent threw at you is not stopped by your avatar; rather it goes through you without causing damage.

There are several modes of play, from the arcade, to the story to survival (just a series of fights without the story interrupting them) and training, which is one-on-one, with no damage sustained by the participants, but you can practice your technique. There are three types of fighters you can choose from – brawler, grappler and martial artist. The grappler does have some different moves, but essentially they are all the same.

When it comes to the controls, this is a game that is frustrating. In one scenario, the mission was to break the arm of your opponent (single-player game). The martial artist character would work the opponent down to where the fighter was susceptible to taking that kind of damage, but the finishing move he threw either was a neck-snapping head-plant, or a jumping kick that broke the knee. The scenario was replayed a dozen times trying to break something other than those two areas.

And whatever style of fighter you take, the game remains completely the same – same settings, same fighters. The replayability lies in having a different fight style.

Once a fight is over, the participants react the same. Regardless of whether you mangled your foe, broke bones, or almost knocked him out, he sits there and gives up the information you were after.

Graphically, clipping problems aside, the game is solid, and the fighting animations are good. The damage a fighter takes seems universal to all fighters and predetermined. You can beat on Angel Face’s midsection until his health bar is so low he taps out and still he has a molar dislodged.

The musical score is decent, but the voice narrative is overdone.

Fight Club has, at times, good fight mechanics, but the game is burdened by the name and expectations associated with that name. There could certainly have been a better way to handle a combat title like this without linking it to a movie that has some interesting twists and turns at the end. But in the end, this game cannot be recommended for its fight elements (there are better fight games on the market), its convoluted storyline nor its skimpy options package.

Gameplay: 5
The game’s story mode is merely a series of fights, with CGI scenes trying to string in the movie plot. It is really just extraneous load times that seemingly have little to do with the progressive challenge of the fights.

Graphics: 6.8

The breaking effect is good, and some of the fight animation is solid. Redundancy, though, is a killer here and while the weather effects may be nice, they have little to do with the affecting the fights. The game does have some environments that do take damage during the fight, but not enough to make it truly interesting.

Sound: 6.5
The narrative is overdone for the most part. The musical score is decent, but the game quality is not advanced by either element.

Difficulty: Easy/Med
There are several difficulty levels to increase the toughness of your opponent in the single player game, but it comes down to button mashing. Do it fast and you string combinations together and can score damaging hits. If your opponent is knocked down, back off so they can’t tag you as they get up. The fight tactics are on the easy side in this game.

Concept: 5
The game offers some innovative ideas in the x-ray, slow-motion, cringe-while-you-watch bone-breaking set pieces, but these are worked over and over and lose their impact after a while. The controller can be reset to your preference, but since most of the combinations are already pre-built, why bother?

Multiplayer: 6
The game does offer online play, but you are burden with the same target, thumb-mashing experience, and with other games coming out that will offer multiple online opponents, it seems that this game would have been better served staying with head-to-head competition on the same machine.

Overall: 5

This game is not that spectacular a fighting game, mostly consisting of repetitive thumb-mashing and hoping you hit the target before the target hits you. The movie line that the story tries to follow is not very intriguing. It is mostly fight, then a cutscene to try to string in a bit of story to link the next fight into the mix. Pass on this one, there are better fight games on the market.