Mixed Martial Arts has one key thing about it: lots of different fighting styles involved in a single tournament. For a video game, this sounds like a great way to add variety and ways to make fighters feel significantly different from each other, which is something that fighting games not based on real sports manage to do. UFC Throwdown certainly has a lot of different fighting styles to choose from. There’s just one massive issue: none of them feel different to play.
This isn’t helped by how the combo system is completely unnecessary to winning matches, as tapping a single button is far more effective – more so than button mashing wildly. The recoil from standard punches is enough that you can just repeatedly punch for most of the fights until you get a knockout, so the actual fighting is very dull. It also lacks the atmosphere that wrestling games manage to bring, not helped by how MMA fighters aren’t that famous (the only one I’d heard of was Tito Ortiz from Razor Freestyle Scooter).
There are a few modes, including a career mode where you start at the bottom and have to improve your stats to reach the top (something let down by a poor character creator), but everything in the game comes off as incredibly fake due to graphical issues, such as the insane distortion the fighters put their bodies through to make basic moves, and the high degree of clipping from any attack or just standing close to each other – it’s always happening. The game as a whole is unpolished and really avoids the “mixed” part of MMA.