Big Rumble Boxing: Creed Champions Review

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Fast Facts

Big Rumble Boxing: Creed Champions is a full-on arcade boxing game; the opposite of the boxing simulator Knockout Kings, which later became the critically acclaimed Fight Night series. You can select Arcade mode, where akin to fighting games, you select a character and fight your way to the boss while experiencing a paper-thin story. Or you can also jump in Versus mode against an A.I. or a buddy.

While it’s an arcade game at its core, don’t expect to jump in and button mash your way through victory. Players can do light, hard attacks, dodge/dash, block, and a Super Attack. The intricacies come down to using the d-pad, or left joystick, mixed with a face button to pull off various punches and subsequently short-lived combos. As you take damage, a special meter will fill up and will allow you to unleash a powerful punch or automated combo to take a decent chunk out of your opponent’s life bar. To win a match, you need to knock out your opponents four times. Although if you pull off enough damage and hard-hitting moves, it is possible they don’t answer the ten count. Also, each character has their own move set so you can experience and try all of them before finding the one that suits your style.

Unlock As You Play

The thing I need to applaud the developers for is having where you need to play actually unlock new content; no DLC, no MTX. Play the game’s arcade mode through the eyes of all the characters, play Versus against the A.I. and the game will reward you with new characters and new outfits. It’s a breath of fresh air in a world saturated by greedy companies that seemingly invest more marketing in their DLC/post-release content than the core game.

Unfortunately, not everything is perfect. The difficulty is very much unbalanced. Even on the Rookie difficulty setting, the A.I. can be merciless and the difficulty will vary as well. The first opponent will feel perfectly balanced as a whole while you get a hang of things, but the next one, still on Rookie, can beat you up fairly quickly. Additionally, the lack of a proper tutorial hurts the game given its surprisingly deep combat. Sure there’s a text-based tutorial but nothing to get you through the motions. While most of the control scheme is easy to grasp, the dodging/dashing is pretty counter-intuitive. These vital movements are bound to the A button (along with using a direction with the joystick). As I’ve played a fair share of fighters, I kept pressing forward or backwards twice to dash to or away resulting in unwanted damage at times.

Looks More Punch-Out! Than Fight Night

Visually speaking, the game looks fine. There’s nothing that will push your console to its limit and given that it’s an arcade game, the characters do look a bit cartoony almost as some of the characters would be better fitted in a Punch-Out!! game. Sylvester Stallone and Dolph Lundgren are barely recognizable as Rocky and Ivan Drago respectively. Michael B. Jordan does look like his counterpart; he’s the best looking of the bunch. The soundtrack is a mix of classic Rocky tunes heard through the series such as the classic Eye of the Tiger and current (t)rap music. I somehow have a feeling that classic ’80-’90s rap would’ve been more appropriate here.

Big Rumble Boxing: Creed Champions is fun, easy to pick up, but hard to master boxing arcade game that’s sure to fill a small void in the genre. The surprisingly deep combat will keep players on their toes by jiving around the ring to dole out punches. Sure the game’s not perfect; even Rookie difficulty can be brutal; questionable control scheme decision, but once you’ve adapted to these nuisances, you’ll find a fun and addictive arcade boxing game where you’ll have a blast unlocking new fighters and outfits.

Rapid Reviews Rating

4 out of 5

4

You can buy Big Rumble Boxing: Creed Champions for Xbox One on the Xbox Marketplace.