Back in the day, fighting games ruled the roost of arcades and gradually made their way to home consoles. Then a game called Mortal Kombat came along, changing the console fighting-game landscape forever. With the next generation of consoles, Ubisoft has created a game that it hopes will have a similar effect, albeit it strictly on a home system. Fighter Within, which launches alongside the Xbox One this week, is the first fighting game designed specifically for the next generation of hardware.
In actuality, Fighter Within is available today at retail and on Amazon, although the Xbox One itself won’t ship until later this week, on Nov. 22. Fighter Within makes full use of the Kinect 2.0 hardware for Xbox One, providing players the ability to mimic real fighting moves while battling their friends to earn bragging rights.
Ubisoft has long been an advocate (and guinea pig) for Kinect technology, and in fact the fighting genre isn’t new ground. On the Xbox 360, Ubisoft released Fighters Uncaged. The company also released Motionsports Adrenaline in 2011, which hit for both the PS3 and Xbox 360. But, Fighter Within is the first game designed specifically for the still-new next-gen systems.
According to Ubisoft, Fighter Within lets players “enter a brutal, physical, and liberating world: Next-gen jaw-dropping graphics, real-time wounds, sweat, and facial impacts in extreme arena environments and primal animations… Kinect allows you to dive into a unique realistic experience and really feel the fight. All that you expect from a next-gen fighting game is there.” You can find out for yourself whether that’s true or not later this week, when the Xbox One is in your hands and you can actually play the Fighter Within game itself.
