Prey Studios’ MMA Manager injects excitement into the mundane work of planning training regimens and managing fighters. Despite mostly relying on tropes and mechanics typical of its genre, there’s a satisfying complexity to how these different mechanics interact. And when it comes to the combat, playing MMA Manager almost has that feeling of being in that mob of spectators that forms around a schoolyard brawl.

MMA Manager is very much about big-shouldered brawlers bashing each other's heads in, but here, the leadup to a bout is just as important as the fight itself. You’ll spend almost all of your time outside of the ring and managing your gym. The gym is where you’ll recruit fighters, hire training staff, purchase gym equipment, and upgrade your facilities. Most importantly, this is where you’ll train your fighters.

Training itself is simply a matter of choosing a fighter, an aspect of their style to improve, and assigning them a trainer. Then, begins the wait for the training to complete. Wait times for upgrades are nothing new in free-to-play management sims, and much of the game is hands-off because of it. Yet, despite how uninvolved training is in MMA Manager, the setup process before commencing training is surprisingly deep -- you need both the proper equipment and the right coach if you want to upgrade a stat. You can hire on as many coaches as you can afford, but no coach teaches everything, so picking your training staff is just as much about finding the right people for your preferred fighting style as it is about getting the highest-rated coaches. The best coaches are all specialization experts, and you quickly learn that a general, all-purpose approach to training isn’t effective beyond the lowest tiers of play.

Now, it’s important to note that training your fighters and thus investing more points into the different aspects of their fighting style doesn’t actually guarantee you’ll win a fight. In order to make money, your fighters have to leave the gym and actually fight, but the game’s matchmaking will pair you against a fighter with the same number of earned training points. Points-wise, both fighters are equal, so how long you’ve trained matters less than how you’ve trained -- what aspects of your fighter’s style have you invested in?

MMA Manager takes a novel approach to fight management that incentivizes having a structured training plan for your fighters. While you can’t take direct control over your fighter, you can influence their fighting style before a bout by moving a set of sliders that change how they defend, the type of attacks they should focus on defending against, and how they balance attacking with defensive actions. In this same pre-match menu, you get an overview of your opponent’s fighting style with valuable data on the kinds of attacks they prefer and what attacks they defend well against.

You have the option to watch a fight or simulate it (skip it). In most games, simulated combat results are usually calculated based on stat differences between the fighters -- the moment-to-moment action of a fight isn’t actually simulated. In a game like Mount & Blade, simulating combat against a statistically more powerful side will usually result in a loss, which is why players will take manual control over any fight where they don’t statistically overwhelm their opponent. In those games, the player can strategize and apply tactics on-the-fly, and that’s often enough to eke out a win even when the numbers say you should lose. However, in MMA Manager, the player has no input once a match begins. After you’ve adjusted your fighting style to your opponent, all you can do is wait for the match to end.

Yet, the physics-based nature of the animations makes combat not just hilarious to witness but also introduces an unpredictability to the proceedings. Watching the two fighters step drunkenly around the arena, swinging fists, grabbing shoulders, and throwing knees, you get a sense of procedurality to the combat that feels almost incalculable -- like your fighter can turn a losing battle around through sheer grit (or a lucky shot!), and simulating the fight would rob them of that opportunity. And after investing so much time into planning a regimen and training your fighter, you can’t help but cheer them on when they nail that takedown or wrestle their way out of a submission.

The training and combat may be deep, refreshing, even innovative, but it’s let down by some poor AI. It can get immensely frustrating when you teach a fighter takedown and grappling skills, but they spend the whole fight throwing strikes instead of trying to go to ground. There are a lot of pre-match sliders that affect your fighter’s style, but it’s sorely missing one that influences how often they strike versus attempt takedowns. This can lead to drawn out fights where neither fighter is moving and acting in a way that complements their actual stats.

A side effect of this “throw everything and see what lands” AI is that the fighter overview you see before a match may not accurately describe a fighter’s actual style, especially if their fight count is low. For example, my grappler decided to throw knees all fight and was successful because his opponent was weak against knee strikes. That doesn’t mean my fighter is a great striker, it means they were successful with knee strikes against an opponent susceptible to them. Crucially, an 80% success rate with knee strikes also doesn’t indicate that my fighter has a tendency to attack with his knees, which undermines the usefulness of the overview.

Monetisation Model of the "MMA Manager"

MMA Manager’s monetisation model revolves entirely around in-app purchases. Much of the game consists of wait times as you train, so naturally, you can spend premium currency to skip these wait times and complete training instantly. You can also use this premium currency to purchase clothing and tattoos for your fighter, though these all appear to be purely cosmetic items that have no effect in the ring.

As described above, matchmaking automatically pairs you with a fighter of a similar level of training. So, while having the extra money to power train your fighter to the higher tiers of combat certainly speeds up your progress, it doesn’t necessarily guarantee you’ll win your

fights. For free players, the fact that all equippable items are purely cosmetic means you won’t have to worry about being outgunned by similarly ranked fighters with more expensive clothing.

The Final Word

I’ve played a lot of sports management sims, but I’ve yet to encounter another that balances the “management” and “sports” sides of the genre as well as MMA Manager. It’s deep, complex, and the physics-based combat is a lot of fun to watch. Unfortunately, the poor AI means fighters throw random attacks that may or may not work with how you’ve trained them. Still, if you’re looking for the next management sim to lose a few hours to, you won’t find anything on mobile that’s as satisfying as MMA Manager.