WMMA3 is an Mixed Martial Arts Tycoon-style game. You are playing a powerful executive in a UFC-style company (not a fighter!) who is in charge of hiring fighters and scheduling matches (like Joe Silva). There are two game modes available: the standard "Career" mode, where you pick a suit, choose his skillset and control a company, and "Quick Fight" mode, where you can easily pair two fighters and see the fight. The career mode is deliberately made less deep than Football Manager's, for instance. I'd rather not call it a Manager game at all. Financial management is limited. The emphasis is on filling your events with attractive matchups and watching the gameworld unfold. You can adjust the rules to be more like PRIDE and can even host legendary UFC 8-man tournaments. It's all up to you. Just watch out to keep your finances positive and that you have some ethnic diversity on your roster.

Gameplay comes down to scheduling fights and scouting potential fighters based on skills, popularity and hype. Will you sign the charismatic ones, the superskilled ones, or will you populate your company with average joes to make your stars look good? There's some weight class management as well. Fighters' stats are quite deep and reflect the game of MMA very well imo. There's things like 'punch power', 'low kick speed', 'muay thai clinch elbow technique', 'killer instinct', 'leglock submissions', Altogether this makes 85+ stats that directly impact the fighter's performance, which is amazing. These stats are constantly progressing as fighters visit camps to train. Once they reach a certain age, certain skills start to deteriorate. Older veterans, however, are often more popular given their history. Will you make them look good as look as possible, or feed them to younger talents?

The game really shines on the part that comes after the gameplay. You don't even have to play to enjoy the game and can turn over control to the AI anytime or watch other AI companies. Afterwards you can sign their stars and pit them against yours. Just don't forget that Japanese stars aren't as popular in the USA as they are at home. When fight night arrives, you get to watch all the fights you want, which is often a trilling experience if you bring yourself to care about the characters. Information hits the screen on a play-by-play basis: every action gets mentioned until you press 'space' to continue to the next. Upset victories have you jump up from your chair in disbelief.

There's also a sandbox option for the people who just want to hire people and have them fight. You will never get fired, run out of money or have matchups refused. Fighters also won't need to prepare in this mode. Either way, the game has limitless replay value as it just keeps going, creating a new fighter whenever one retires. One of the best things about the game is the support for modders: There's real life mods, there's expansions for the fictional one that comes with the game, there's a video game characters mod, etc. Anyone can easily mod the game during gameplay or make new characters and importing them into your existing game is child's play. More games should have this kind of support.

While I really enjoy the game and have spend hundreds of hours on it, there are several things about the game that could potentially frustrate you, so consider this a warning:

* Due to the resources used to create the game the resolution of this game is fixed, so there's no full screen mode. There's no 'fix' for this. On my 22" screen it takes about half the screen. If this somehow bothers you, try the demo first on their official website. I personally decorate my desktop with MMA-style graphics to counter this. I suggest you do the same.

* It's a text-based simulator so there's few graphics: there are (often quite nice-looking) renders of all the fighters, and there's promotion logo's and banners. During the fights, there's no visual representation. Personally, I think that's great as you can imagine the fights taking place without visual restrictions. However, this obviously requires some imagination. And to imagine it you also need some MMA knowledge. If you've only watched a couple of UFC events you might get lost in the positions and interactions. You don't need to be an expert or a practitioner: just a fan who watches regularly and knows what an 'americana' or the 'north-south position' is.

* There's actually an advanced version of the game available called WMMA4 on the developer's website. This game has more options and tweaks to fix some problems mentioned in other reviews (like the contract signings). I think it's a great improvement but the difference is not so groundbreaking to wait years before it finally comes to Steam (if you don't want to buy directly from their store).

If you are not bothered by these things and are a fan of MMA, I'm pretty sure you'll enjoy the game. I posted a small guide/tutorial to help you book your first MMA event. You can even run it with the free demo on the GDS site. If the outcome doesn't excite you, maybe text-based sims aren't your thing. But any MMA fan owes it to himself to try. :)

I absolutly love this game, The UI is a little clunky and I could not find any way to change screen size or resolution. Regardless i have played this game for about 10 hours on and since buying it yesterday and I am hooked. Love signing free agents and building my roster. Can't wait until WMMA 4 is availible on a steam, would buy day 1.


"Edit" I have played this game so much, i have so many stories to tell, legends that were made. great game.

This game is not without its flaws (and there are a LOT of them - mostly to do with the horrid interface), but it needs to get noticed by more gamers. Why, you ask?

1. It's the only game of its kind for MMA. No other management sim comes close.
2. It's a statisticians wet dream. Every single fighter in the game has a unique profile, dozens of different attributes, and a fight history that develops over the course of the game.
3. Each fighter is also represented by some very nice artwork. (And many of the women are hawt!)
4. Even though it is a text-based game, the fights seem like they're happening right in front of you. If something exciting is happening in the ring/octagon, you'll get messages such as BIG STRIKE! appear in bold red, and it brings the events to life.
5a. The main reason why I love this game is the editor, which allows you to completely customise the entire database of fighters, companies, TV shows, etc, to your liking. Why other management sims don't do this, I'll never know. It adds a tremendous amount of value, (thus the hundreds of hours of play time.)
5b. There are loads of brilliantly made fan mods available out there.

If you like MMA, then you NEED this game. If you have a good imagination, then you're set with the default database. If realism is what you're after, you can download and incorporate a real UFC mod/mods. Either way, it's worth the price.
10/10

EDIT: WMMA-4 is/has been out now, have around the same time on that as WMMA3. More in-depth options, reality shows, and noticeably improved UI in general are the highlights. Not on steam, but on the devs store, worth a look if you liked WMMA3

I've put more hours into this game than just about any other. I've played it since the first version was relased and found each version a nice step up from the previous. This version isn't the newest either, but I've still played this one more.

First off, this game is going to appeal to the gamer who wants to be an owner and matchmaker for an MMA organization rather than a fighter. This is not one of those take over a guy and see how high you can get him games, it more strategy and sand box than that. Think of Sim City meets UFC.

Graphics are not present in the game, and the fight play by plays can get repetitive after a few thousand fights, but that doesn't change the interest in the fight for me. With this being more of a sandbox game you have the option to watch the world unfold, or to actively grow your company. You can choose to stay small and thrive or go for broke and become the top company in the world.

It's still too easy to become financially sound in the game, so some house rules might need to be in order, but the fun factor isn't impacted. Fights themselves can be "watched" or simply simmed with the results shown afterward. Once you've become accustomed to the world it's easy to get locked into that one more turn feel. Setting up your next matchups, developing young fighters or deciding to let your icon leave because he just can't do it anymore are all choices you'll have to make.

You'll also have the opportunity to tweak the rule set for your company and that can have a massive effect on what guys are going to perform best for you and your relevance in the larger MMA world.

Overall, I'm very happy with this game and have no problem recommending the game for people who love MMA and contol over the business aspects of the sport.

Being a fan of MMA and also a fan of management/simulation games, I figured this game would be right up my alley. Boy, was I right. By "right up my alley" I mean life-consuming time-destroyer. Very few games have ever actually made me emotional. The part of Red Dead Redemption when you first ride into Mexico as the sun is setting and the music starts playing, that made me emotional, I felt a sense of freedom and adventure that no game has before, or since, evoked in me. That, however, is not the kind of emotion I get from WMMA3. The emotions I have felt in this game have ranged from "NO! I just spent 5 fights getting this dude up to main event status and now he refuses to resign with me!?" (Anger) to "HOW DID SHE POSSIBLY LOSE TO THAT BUM I ONLY HIRED FOR ONE FIGHT" (Also anger, and confusion) and also "This dude wins the belt and now wants to take a hiatus to spend more time with his family? WHO CARES ABOUT YOUR FAMILY! GET IN THAT CAGE AND MAKE ME MONEY YOU JERK!" (Anger again.....hmmmm, this game really seems to anger me). But I digress, although the game can be infuriating at times it's also supremely satisfying to set up a ripper of a card and have everything fall into place as you get fight ratings of Great/Fantastic and the ever elusive Excellents. I usually judge games based on $/Hr of Gameplay. My base ratio being 1:1. I spent $22CAD on this game on a sale and so far I'm at 142hrs on record so a ratio of 22:142 or $1/6.45hrs so I am extremely happy with my purchase. If MMA and Simulation games are your thing and you're not on a hunt for mind melting visuals and sweeping orchestral soundtracks and would rather just have some fun setting up MMA fight cards and building up your own MMA company, this is the game for you my friend (I assume if you are looking at this game on Steam, we'd probably be friends, unless you're a jerk, in which case, I don't want to be friends, you jerk).

Got this yesterday (already have WMMA4) and did a few shows with UFC in a real life mod. How open the game is in terms of outcomes and the challenge of building up a fighter's reputation, win streaks are all big plusses. My favourite part of this game is the booking, especially one night tournaments which makes it so easy to progress through the weeks and months and play this game in short bursts. It's been a lot of fun so far, looking to make matches to keep win streaks going but at the same time, put on a good show. My only gripe is I can't plan shows upto a year in advance as I like to get the shows booked and get on with seeing the results.

WMMA3 is probably my favourite of the series so far, so I'd definitely recommend this game to anybody considering this if you like management/simulation games.

A must have for any hardcore MMA and simulation games fan. Altough it doesen't offer much in terms of fancy graphics, the game is very mod-friendly and there's tons of them out there. Pretty easy to customise and create your own fighters, organizations etc.

This game is great, but I would advise getting it's newer counter part World of Mixed Martial Arts 5 off of greydogsoftware's website. The newer one has updated character portraits, UI, and tons more to do and edit.

Fun game about booking mma matches and then seeing how it plays out. This game is text only about running your own mma company, there isn't any user controlled fighting or graphics. Great game if you like mma and sports management games. The real world mods make it even better.