it is worse than the first game. the first game actually made u feel like u were a human moving through time and space. You could walk people down. You could pressure fight. If you rock somebody, you had stand-up options to knock em down.
EA UFC 2 I saw some wonky things in some of the streams but I knew that the EA UFC 2 people worked with the 'GameChangers' a group of decent to really good EA UFC players to get their opinion about how to improve the game. I read on the official forums about how they were really impressed with the changes from the working model of the game they got to playtest. Now either these players were lying, the Devs didn't release that version of the game, or the players were actually morons, because we basically got a steaming pile with cool KO animations.
You cannot walk people down in this game, if you rock somebody. the other person can just high block and run away and the only thing you can maybe do is walk them down and clinch, but it they just instant-block the clinch attempt there is nothing you can do. If you jab, it seems to take about 2 seconds for the animation to finish and you only move half a foot forward. you can do what you think is a super-smart 4 hit combo then he just does a high kick out of nowhere and you get rocked. Kicking people and doing spinning shit is overpowered in this game. Takedowns have just about no range and the animation is you moving 2 feet forward like a moron.
The ground game is slower and more boring than the first game, there is a second delay when you move from position to position. The player on top can't just get off the ground when they are in a dominant position, i'm pretty sure they have to be in guard to do so which is idiotic. The clinch is overemphasized/overpowered. Clinch is most boring aspect of EA UFC 1, not sure why they made it an even bigger thing in EA UFC 2.
The character models look worse than the first game. Conor McGregor looks like Conor McGregor's high salt-intake brother. The KO animations are pretty funny tho and are more satisfying than the first game, but it doesn' t make up for all the game's faults, especially the stiff standup. Right now I'm not that good I'm still in division 2 and am like 20-18 or something shitty but this is not going to be a game i'm going to play regularly like the first game unless it gets radically changed through patches.