When comparing EA Sports UFC 3 vs NieR: Automata, the Slant community recommends NieR: Automata for most people. In the question“What are the best single player games on PS4?” NieR: Automata is ranked 19th while EA Sports UFC 3 is ranked 97th. The most important reason people chose NieR: Automata is:
The combat in NieR: Automata is fantastic. It has a hack-and-slash feel to it, with an emphasis on agility and showy acrobatics. With the fluid and responsive controls, you can switch seamlessly from using swift attacks with your weapon to devastatingly strong attacks as you combo them together. You also use customizable ranged missile attacks from your personal robot pod, such as powerful laser beams or a giant hammer attack. It can be difficult to win battles sometimes, especially on the harder gameplay settings, but it's worthwhile to keep at it and watch yourself progress and improve.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Career mode goes way deeper than just fighting
Career mode offers a new way to play that resembles a simulation game. In this mode, your goal is to become the best fighter possible, starting from the World Fighting Alliance and working your way up to be recruited and fighting in the ranks of the UFC.
During this mode, you will have to manage not only your fighter in the ring as you punch and kick your way to the top, but everything that goes into the spectacle itself such as promoting your fights, building hype, and making fans. You are free to join and represent different gyms, with each one focusing on a particular fighting style.
Every week you get points to spend on upgrading your character, learning new moves, promoting fights, and conducting research about your opponent's strengths and weaknesses. It's not possible to do everything at once, so it's up to you how you choose to spend your points. This mode will really appeal to players who want some more depth to their beat-em-up and gives a nice glimpse into what goes on behind the scenes in the UFC.
Pro Reworked striking system leads to more strategic fighting
The striking system for UFC 3 has been reworked from the system appearing in 1 and 2. Using the control stick on the right, you can now bob and sway to dodge and avoid incoming punches and kicks. This new striking system allows you to set up counterattacks by dodging and striking back-to-back allowing for more strategic counterplay. It encourages a delicate balance between offense and defense, as one smart move can lead to knocking out your opponent, whereas one wrong move can send you crumbling to the floor.
Pro Fights look and feel polished
When your fists or feet connect with an opponent, you can see the pain in their face as they stagger backwards. Hits and kicks feel heavy and powerful, with a real impact, and the animations are incredibly smooth. Fighters are molded after their real life counterparts in extreme detail down to tattoos and facial expressions. Everything about the fights just looks and feels fluid and polished from the lighting in the ring to the punching, kicking, and grappling itself.
Pro You can step into the ring as your favorite fighter
All major UFC fighters are playable in game, with the in-game models doing a great job of representing their real life counterparts. It's a great chance to step into the shoes of your favorite fighter as you punch, kick, and grapple your way to victory. In the event you want to create your own fighter, you can even do that as well.
Pro Stamina meter promotes intelligent play over wild swinging
Whenever you take an action during a fight, your stamina meter will slowly deplete. Jumping into the ring and wildly throwing punches and kicks will get you nowhere and exhaust your fighter. The game requires you to play smart to win. You will have to manage your stamina so that you can punch, kick, and execute combos when the time is right, conserving your energy for the best takedown moments. This stamina system adds a nice layer of strategic play, as well as a manageable resource, to a genre that is mostly filled with button mashing.
Pro Fast-paced, action-packed combat
The combat in NieR: Automata is fantastic. It has a hack-and-slash feel to it, with an emphasis on agility and showy acrobatics. With the fluid and responsive controls, you can switch seamlessly from using swift attacks with your weapon to devastatingly strong attacks as you combo them together. You also use customizable ranged missile attacks from your personal robot pod, such as powerful laser beams or a giant hammer attack. It can be difficult to win battles sometimes, especially on the harder gameplay settings, but it's worthwhile to keep at it and watch yourself progress and improve.
Pro Unique storytelling with a real emotional impact
NieR: Automata's outlook on storytelling is incredibly special. To get the full experience, you have to run multiple playthroughs of the game, each of which offers a new experience and perspective. Your world view of the story events and characters expands drastically as you complete each playthrough, playing on your expectations to help you develop a deeper emotional bond with the protagonists and become invested in their plight.
Things take a real turn on your third playthrough, putting you on an emotional roller coaster all the way to the true ending. The plot twists and knocks on the fourth wall elevate the story to a truly unique place. Getting all the way to the very end can be a religious experience from how much heart and meaning you discover in the symbolism.
Pro It's got a hauntingly beautiful environment
NieR: Automata is set in a post-apocalyptic landscape after Earth has been overrun by hostile machines, and the artists really nailed what that would feel like. Abandoned and overgrown cities litter the landscape along with old refineries, graveyards, and eerie forests. When you add the beautiful soundtrack to the experience, it fills you with a bittersweet mix of loneliness and hope.
Pro Varied genre-spanning gameplay elements
NieR: Automata has different types of gameplay to keep things interesting. From the very start, you're on an on-rails bullet hell section, and then you switch over to the more traditional action RPG style of fast-paced combat. Things change up again not long after with some side-scrolling platforming from a 2D view. Later on in the story, there's a hacking mini-game where you navigate a tiny ship through a short puzzle, with the music changing to a charming retro sound to fit the theme and mood. This is a game that doesn't stay boxed in a single genre.
Pro An incredible amount of content
Outside of the main story, there's plenty of optional content to dive into. The side quests are the best way to get to know the characters and lore of the world, with some of them giving clever and subtle foreshadowing of the game's most critical events. There are also weapons to collect and upgrade, each of which offer nice little tidbits of lore after you get them to max level. And after reaching a certain point in the story, you get access to Chapter Select that lets you go back and replay whatever you want. You can easily spend 60+ hours exploring the world and still have much more to do.
Pro Gorgeous, ethereal soundtrack with amazing vocals
NieR: Automata's music is out of this world. It's so stunning and elegant in a way that nothing else can really live up to. The soundtrack manages to emotionalize the game through music, from the action-packed tracks with hard-hitting wind instruments and percussion, to the softer, somber songs that encapsulate the hauntingly beautiful environments and story moments you encounter. Vocals in the lore's indescribable language makes the music even more memorable, adding to the ethereal quality of the sound. This soundtrack is definitely one that you can go back to again and again without getting sick of it.
Cons
Con Poor submission and grappling system
Unlike the strategic fighting, the submission and grappling system is handled through a timed minigame in which you press buttons in a certain order or move the control stick in a certain direction. This can feel disjointed from the rest of the fight.
Con Ultimate Team mode has microtransactions
The only way to add fighters or moves to your team in Ultimate Mode is through an item shop.
Con Fight commentary gets repetitive
While there's nothing wrong with it at first, the same bland pre-recorded lines are used over and over, resulting in commentary that feels very repetitive over time.
Con Limited open world
Even though NieR: Automata is technically an open world game, it doesn't always feel like it. It's more that there's a big open space in the center of the ruined city you explore, with branches that lead off to vastly different environments, like a desert, a village, and a few other places. These locations aren't that spacious, either, and it's a bit of a stretch to even imagine all of these places being so close together in the first place. It's not too much of an issue as long as you find the story and combat engaging enough.
Con Second playthrough can get repetitive
Once you get to Route B, your second playthrough, you may find that too much is the same. There are some big differences, such as the new way you get to see things play out, but a lot of it rehashes Route A, your first playthrough. There's a ton of hacking you have to do as well, which gets pretty boring after repeating it over and over again. But if you stick with it, Route C and onward are absolutely worth the time spent getting to that point.
Con Some boring fetch quests
The pacing gets messed up when you're forced to run certain fetch quests near the start of the game. This is somewhat forgivable after the fun and action-packed introductory level, but the quests themselves are still a drag to play through. Some of the side quests can also boil down to the same thing. Even though these quests give a lot of useful information about the world, they're not all that fulfilling, and you may dread having to repeat them when playing through the game again.
Con Buggy on PC
Some players complain about the game crashing, freezing, their save files mysteriously disappearing, and more. As of June 2018, over a year after the game's initial release, there is still no patch to fix these problems. Not everyone on PC will have these bugs, but it's still quite prevalent. If you continually run into issues, your best bet is to find a mod or play the console versions instead of waiting on an official patch that may never happen.