K-1 World Grand Prix is all about fighting between well-trained martial artists. In the game, you’ll play as one of 20 top-ranked K-1 fighters as you punch, kick, taunt and grab your way through the world circuit. In total, there are seven game modes, ranging from single fights to eight-man grudge matches, with the obvious favorite being the game’s namesake, the World Grand Prix.

Upon firing up your first match, you’ll immediately be forced to face this game’s biggest problem: a complete lack of personality. The best fighters from the K-1 circuit are all there, but you have no idea what the differences are between them unless you read the manual. And you still don’t really end up caring about these guys since the game shows off none of their real-world personalities. The fighters don’t exhibit any individual personality quirks, and so you end up just picking the biggest butt-kicker you can find. Problem is, you can win this game with any of them, there’s no need to take your time choosing a fighter.

K-1 is, unfortunately, a button-masher. While the developers tried to boost the depth of gameplay by mapping each face button to a separate limb (right fist, left fist, right leg and left) and building in a decent combo system, there’s really no need for any of it. K-1 also tries to innovate by using a location specific damage system, however, this just serves to make it even easier to TKO your opponent. Take your favorite attack, aim it for your opponent’s legs or torso and beat him down time and again. Once his legs are too weak to support him (or his torso too punished), a quick one-two punch to the head is all it takes to finish him off.

As if the button-mashing wasn’t irritating enough, there’s the slow pace of the game. Players move as if they had lead in their shoes, and attacks are so slow you can go get a cup of coffee before a punch lands. Oftentimes, you’ll throw a kick and it takes so long to make contact, your target will have walked right inside the attack, thus avoiding the kick entirely.

It doesn’t help a game to have a graphics engine with as horrible clipping problem as K-1’s. Punches and kicks literally pass right through your opponents, while head grabs completely miss their unprotected targets. Worst of all, there are times when you can partially disappear behind the ropes, that is, if you can move fast enough to get near them.

While Konami’s developers may have slipped up in the clipping department, they made up for it with the stunning character models. Motion captured and meticulously mapped, the fighters look like the real McCoy and have a fluid look to their motion. The non-combatants, however, don’t look nearly as good, with horribly distorted facial features topped off with a clunky style of movement. So long as you keep your eyes on the fighters, the graphics won’t let you down.

If you like 80’s headbanger metal, you’ll enjoy the soundtrack for K-1. For everyone else, I suggest quickly turning off the background music, although this will leave you with just the basic sounds of men thumping each other’s skulls and the ring of the bell. These both sound ok, but they’re not enough to make the game sounds all that interesting.

When it comes right down to it, there’s not enough new or innovative enough about K-1 World Grand Prix to get me to recommend it to anyone but the most hardcore fans of the sport. The gameplay tries to be deep, but in the end is nothing more than a few hours of button mashing, and when you couple that with the bland fighters, you won’t be playing this game for long, if at all. For fans of fighting sports, I’d say rent it while everyone else should avoid it.