Well I bit the bullet and bought it.
1. The game looks great, but the framerate is embarrassingly low. With only two people to animate totally, there's no excuse to go below 30fps. At times, the game becomes unplayable because it just stutters uncontrollably.
2. A lot of things are dumbed down to make the game faster. For instance, there are no sprawls or takedown battles. There's just takedown or non-takedown that happens in 2 seconds, which makes the game prone to takedown spamming. I had one opponent attempt 118 takedowns in one round, and there's hardly a stamina penalty for it.
3. A lot of things were emphasized that hardly ever happen in an MMA fight. For instance, flying knees off the cage and triple somersault kicks score instant KOs and are so easy to do and spam over and over again, and there's also hardly any stamina penalty for them.
4. The ground transitions are far too simplistic. It's too easy to stand up, and there's no penalty for attempting to get up from the bottom. You can just spam the stand up button over and over and the guy on top won't be able to strike, won't be able to do anything, except for defend the attempt, which results in nothing, or just allow the stand up to happen. Dominant positions are way too easy to transition out of, and the referee forces a stand up even if you've got back mount (which is supposedly the most dominant position of all, and never gets stood up in any real fight).
5. The submission battle is pretty good, actually, but it takes too long for my liking. Real submission attempts in the UFC can take only a few seconds for jiu-jitsu masters.
6. There's no real penalty for running out of stamina on the ground, meaning you can just spam the same moves over and over again regardless of your stamina level.
7. The game is so small - there are only three modes to speak of: fight now, career, and online. The career mode is as bare-bones as they come, instead focusing on a bunch of videos from fighters and trainers encouraging you to do your best. These videos take up a bunch of space which could've been used for much more interesting and useful features like multiple training camps, more aesthetic options for your fighter, etc.
Overall - 5.5/10. It's probably worth buying as a fight fan because you can "probably" make the game behave the way you want to (for instance, I force the game to not allow silly shit by forcing my fighter to behave a certain way) and not take advantage of the spammable material. It's a very disappointing effort though, which shows that EA has really lost its touch with making sports games aside from handegg. I hope 2k gets to use the UFC license sometime soon.
