The unfathomably awesome visual and gameplay impact of 2006’s sublime Fight Night Round 3 was not unlike the face-melting effects felt by the Nazis when they cracked open the Ark of the Covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Okay, we mean in a good way, without the floating banshees and lakes of fire, of course. And though three years is a long time between sequels — especially in sports games — the improvements between Round 3 and the overdue Round 4 aren’t immediately apparent.

But somehow…it’s prettier. The characters look a little more realistic and less cartoony, while the subtleties of the blood and sweat have been refined to an eerily lifelike degree (did EA somehow figure out how to mo-cap body fluids?). And playing it for ourselves revealed a wealth of under-the-hood changes that not only look great on paper, but actually benefit FNR4’s gameplay as well. Our hands-on time also towels off any fears we might’ve had about this series moving from the now-defunct EA Chicago to the Great White North and EA Canada.

In short, there is nothing left to do but start playing Round 3 again to train for your next bout.

First things first: Though the dual-analog controls remain and will be instantly familiar to anyone who’s spent time with Round 3, tweaks have been made for the better. You’ll no longer need a modifier to throw body blows (an old habit we couldn’t quite break during our sessions). Instead, a simple tap to the left or right on the right thumbstick will initiate a kidney punch. The RB button now acts as a haymaker modifier: hold it and then execute your punch of choice to throw a slower, more powerful version of whatever you’ve just queued. The face buttons, meanwhile — A for a signature punch, B for a dirty hit, Y to grapple, and X to push away — return unchanged.

Also new is the interactive gameplay that pops up between rounds. Eschewing the Q-Tip– swabbing mini-game from Round 3 — yeah, it was fun at first but got repetitive by the fifth fight — Round 4 introduces an RPG-like system that lets you cash in points earned through your performance during the round in exchange for small, medium, or large recoveries to your health, stamina, or damage. While you can simply select “Auto” and let the game decide your best course of action, a layer of strategy comes from the fact that, for instance, if you’ve had a good round, you can simply save all your points for a time later on in the fight when you’ll need them a lot more.

As for those physics we gushed over in our first-look preview a couple issues back? They’re anything but window dressing. With FNR4’s spiffy new feature that let us edit together fight highlights for upload to Xbox Live (and because it can be so difficult to parse the details at full speed), we kept pausing and replaying bouts to see stuff like our Mike Tyson actually touching faces with an opposing Muhammad Ali — making their heads naturally tilt in the wake of the slight impact. We also witnessed punches that barely grazed their target because of the other guy’s realistic movements (something that happens all the time in real-life boxing), and even jabs that went over the top of a foe’s head, connecting with nothing but air.

In a later fight, we got clocked with a right cross for a knockdown blow, and as we dropped to our knees, we were whacked again in the back of the skull, sending our Mike Tyson avatar face-first into the ropes, where he bounced back and fell flat onto the canvas, unable to get back up. While this could happen in Round 3, it was more of an optical illusion gameplay-wise. Here, it’s all too real.

Finally, we’re assured that all of the venues from Round 3 will return, along with plenty of new ones. They’ll serve as the settings for the rebuiltfrom- scratch career mode, where your goal is to become the greatest of all time. In the videogame boxing world, of course, Round 3 currently holds that title. It is the face-melting Ark of the Videogame Boxing Covenant. So the question is, will Round 4 be Fight Night’s Temple of Doom or its Kingdom of the Crystal Skull?