Mixed-Martial Arts is a complex, exciting, technical sport, there's the punches of boxing, grapples of olympic wrestling, throws of judo and ground submissions of some sort of extreme hugging. To make a good MMA game, you need to combine all of these features flawlessly and simply enough for anyone to pick up a controller, while also appeasing the ardent MMA fans, a mighty task one would think.

So up steps UFC Undisputed 3, the annual offering from Ultimate Fighting Championship, the best place for MMA action, developed by THQ who are pretty much unchallenged as the best developers of wrestling and MMA games.

With fully licensed UFC fighters, and the new inclusion of featherweight and bantamweight divisions, as well as the introduction of the PRIDE Fighting Championship's rosters and (slightly more brutal) rules, there are over 150 fighters to play as or against.

Jumping into a fight straight off the bat, the game features new grapple system, which for experienced players involves rotating the control stick to change position and alter your grapple, while the beginners can just move the stick up or down. The fights pause mid-game the game at regular intervals to instruct you the necessary buttons to push, which can be, and will get turned off immediately.

While the bouts start out as button-mashers to get the strikes in, the more you find out about the control system, the more ease you can dispatch rivals, although having said that, it doesn't seem like there's much beneath the striking and grappling submission systems. While punching people in the head and then trying to dislocate their joints is thoroughly enjoyable, it means that the game doesn't take much to master, which makes it a short-term burst of enjoyment rather than something more substantial.

The strikes work well and are where you feel like you're making the most damage; an indicator shows how much punishment you're dishing out and receiving to each area of the body. Annoyingly, sometimes (but not unsurprisingly as UFC fans will testify) if you're on top of the fight, one sucker punch the opposition can bring an unexpected defeat.

The grapples and submission holds are a bit trickier, once you have got someone in the right hold and apply a submission, an octagon indicator appears on the screen. It is there where both players rotate the control sticks around it; the attacker must overlap their icon, while the defender desperately rotates away to escape the hold. Overall this greatly benefits the defender as almost always the hold gets broken, which is pretty frustrating if you're soundly beating them and want to finish off in style. An accidental slip while trying to escape a hold could leave you submitting completely out of the blue.

The career mode has decided to remove as much impetus on stats as previous UFC games, getting you into fights more frequently. Training provides more upgrades and stat boosts to improve your fighter at a quicker rate to get to the big-time glory. Now you can also play career mode with a real-life fighter instead of your created fighter if you don't want to go through the create-a-fighter mode, which is wonderfully detailed.

As the looks of the game and the fight dynamics run so slickly and fluidly, one point that sticks out is that there hardly seems to be any difference between the weight classes, the featherweights aren't quicker, the heavyweight's strikes aren't more brutal. 

Points like this, and frequent prolonged loading times aside, UFC Undisputed 3 is thoroughly enjoyable MMA experience that you can pick up and get stuck into and have great fun playing. If you're looking for something to capture your attention for the long-term, unless you're an avid UFC fan, the undetailed control system means that it won't be this.