Ready 2 Rumble Revolution Wii Review

I’m guessing that the Revolution of the title is in regards to the controls, as the newest Ready 2 Rumble isn’t too far removed from other titles in the series. It still involves cartoon boxers slugging it out in a more over the top manner than what you’d see in real life. I’m not a boxing fan, but I’m guessing that a powerful punch has never sent an opponent flying up towards the rafters, lets face it, even Ivan Drago couldn’t do that.

With the recent FaceBreaker K.O. Party and the upcoming release of Punch-Out, Ready 2 Rumble Revolution is another Wii boxing game along those same lines, with a fresh roster of larger than life characters (here they’re silly caricatures of celebrities, including the likes of Brad Pitt, Simon Cowell, Jack Black, David Beckham and John Travolta) and a new publisher and developer in Atari and AKI Corporation. Well, at least Michael “Lets get ready to rumble” Buffer makes his return.

The game mechanics and balance are definitely there: obviously, being a boxing game, there’s a lot of punching, but there’s also the potential to parry the attacks of opponents, stamina to take into consideration, duck and sway manoeuvres to avoid the angry leather gloves, and a rumble meter to increase your power and give you the opportunity to send your opponent straight out of the ring and probably into orbit, such is the force that they’re hit with.

Now, to those all important controls. The tutorial is definitely worthwhile, tutoring you on the said controls and allowing you to practice them, instead of just heading into the game blindly, flailing the remote and nunchuck and hoping you are doing the correct motions. The game uses button presses in combination with motion sensing to determine what sort of punch is thrown: forward thrusts of the remote and nunchuck result in quick face stinging jabs, upward motions pull off chin hammering uppercuts, hooks are performed with sideways directions, body blows are executed in the same manner but with a button press, whilst the more powerful punches happen through first setting them up with a motion and then using the aforementioned gestures.

In my own experience, the controls are pretty responsive, although there’s a steep learning curve and it’s not always as precise as I would have hoped. It’s no good if you are doing one thing and the game decides that you are attempting to do something else, although I certainly don’t think the controls are as broken as some have suggested, but it would have been nice for the game to have support for the GameCube or classic controller, all that constant flailing does tire the arms out after all.

As far as options go, Ready 2 Rumble Revolution has a pleasing amount of them. There’s arcade, team fight and tournament options, a deeper championship mode and a collection of decent mini games. The championship mode has you beginning as a rookie and playing as your own created boxer, climbing the rankings and aiming your sights towards the titles of each class: training (using those decent mini games, which range from good to unresponsive in my experience) during the week and destroying faces at the weekend. It’s also where you’ll find characters and arenas to unlock.

Graphically the game isn’t particularly attractive and even the art style doesn’t particularly appeal to me (I prefer FaceBreaker‘s rubbery faces and Punch-Out‘s very cartoon look), although at least the faces of the characters turn from clean to all messed up as matches wear on, although by all messed up I merely mean a few bruises here and there.

Ready 2 Rumble Revolution may lack precision control, although its biggest problem is that it feels so average to play and not something I’d return to time and time again. It’s not terrible by any means, just completely unspectacular and, at times, more imprecise than it should be.

Ah well, at least it gave me the opportunity to give Jack Black a fat lip for the terribly unfunny Be Kind Rewind.