Metacritic Games

Fight Club (Xbox)

Learn the 8 Rules of Fight Club. In the underground world of Fight Club, the fight isn't over until someone goes limp, taps out, or is beaten. Immerse yourself in this gritty, visceral world of bare-knuckle fighting, with action, story elements and environments true to the Fight Club movie. The extreme realism of the game will make you feel every punch and kick by delivering shocking visuals, untraditional moves, and special effects in fully interactive environments. [Vivendi Universal]

Vivendi Universal
Action, Fighting
Players: 2
M (Mature)
Developer: Genuine Games
Released November 16, 2004

Overall Metascore

This is a weighted, normalized average of all individual scores given by critics, on a scale of 0 (worst) to 100 (best).

37 / 100

Critic Reviews

67 Play Magazine
Plays surprisingly well on its foundation of three schools of combat: brawler, marial artist, and grappler. Place it next to Japan's best and the game gets pummeled. [Nov 2004, p.75]
64 Official Xbox Magazine
The fighting engine is too simple, too easy to exploit, and just, well...you know, average.[Holiday 2004, p.78]
55 Game Informer
If Tyler Durden saw you sitting on your comfy couch, and playing Fight Club (possibly over your fancypants internet connection), he would probably hit you as hard as he could. [Jan 2005, p.119]
55 Talk Xbox
If I was David Fincher right now, I would be looking for the man or woman assigned to approve this project and making sure they never had a job again.
50 Yahoo! Games
Since the game is rooted so strictly in reality, you'll see no special moves and very few cool combos. What is here is overly difficult to control for how simple it is.
50 GameZone
A very weak fighting game that has almost no depth or complexity to it, and one that nearly any gamer regardless of skill level should be able to completely finish in one night.
48 Next Level Gaming
It's just a shame that it's got quite possibly the worst gameplay I've seen in a fighting game I think ever. When I can't play a game for more than 5-6 minutes at a time, that is NOT a good thing.
47 BonusStage
The fighting mechanics are highly outdated and just don't reach to the heights of something like "VF4."
46 TotalGames.net
It's not horrific in a way that will leave stains on your fingers, but standing alongside "Dead Or Alive: Ultimate" and "Mortal Kombat: Deception," Fight Club is like putting a teddy bear into a lions den.
45 IGN
As a game based on a movie, it tarnishes any good memory of the exceptional 1999 anti-materialist work thanks to poor presentation, sloppy story-telling, and well, missing the point.
40 DailyGame
It's just a waste of a strong license. I really hope Chuck Palahniuk, the author of the book this mess is based upon, had nothing to do with ok'ing this game. Avoid at all costs, even if it's in the discount bin.
40 GameSpy
It's hard to figure how they could have got the story, characters, and point more wrong than this. Perhaps by replacing Tyler Durden with, say, Dick Cheney, things would have been worse.
40 AceGamez
Even die-hard Fight Club fans who give it a little try, just to play as their favourite characters from the film will be woefully disappointed at the wasted use of the license.
40 Gamers' Temple
We've got some new rules for Fight Club. Rule Number One: Do not play Fight Club. Rule Number Two: Tell all of your friends about Fight Club.
40 GMR Magazine
A half-assed first try. Fight Club falls flat. [Jan 2005, p.100]
40 G4 TV
The game creators obviously didn’t consult Palahniuk. Maybe he would’ve sat them down, and explained the yet-released ninth rule: Don’t make a crap fighting game and call it Fight Club.
37 GameSpot
A resounding failure. Unless you're a masochistic Fight Club fan looking to purposely have your sensibilities offended, then you'd be well advised to stay far away from this game.
36 TeamXbox
Poor combat mechanics coupled with simplistic controls is where Fight Club begins to fall apart. A weak storyline that feels more like bits and pieces from a larger story told through still images rather than animated scenes takes so much more away from the game then they add, making the process of playing through Fight Club more of an exercise in futility than entertaining.
35 Xbox Evolved
"Fight Club" fans everywhere should especially stay away from this skid mark in the fighting game genre.
32 netjak
The game suffers from a thirst of a quick cash-in by robbing gamers of a title that is all about conformity. Talk about creating a product that contradicts itself. Avoid this title at all costs, unless you want to recreate that feeling you get when you scratching your fingers across a chalkboard.
30 Xbox Nation Magazine
To be fair, the backgrounds look pretty. [Jan 2005, p.90]
30 GamerFeed
Fight Club doesn't offer anything of value. Bad gameplay, bad graphics, and bad voicework make this not even worth getting for free.
30 1UP
Uneven production values have wound up creating one of the cleanest and quietest "gritty" games ever. While the fighting environments are rich with lots of detail and natural lighting, they also appear to have janitors on duty 24/7.
30 Cheat Code Central
The first rule of Fight Club has now been changed to "Don't buy Fight Club".
25 Electronic Gaming Monthly
If you want a taste of the gritty underground fight scene depicted in the movie "Fight Club," you'd be better off paying somebody 50 bucks to beat you to a bloody pulp than wasting money on this game. It's unpolished, unfinished, and just plain bad. [Holiday 2004, p.102]
20 GameCritics
I mean, the game's already five years past being relevant, it would have killed them to take another six months to make it decent?
15 PALGN
Playing Fight Club should be considered an act of masochism.
0 Gaming Age
Sure, it's pretty generic underneath it all, but the layering of sheer badness elevates it to a certain legendary state. Give it a rent, and let the hilarity begin at the fact everything comes off as either a really clever parody of licensed games-or one of the worst things you've ever had to play.
0 Game Revolution
The developers spent far too much time making sure Fight Club looked good in screenshots rather than making sure it would look good during play.

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