Summary

This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.
If this game only cost $10 Iâ??d probably say, â??buy it at your own risk.â?? As for me, I purchased the game, played it for the better part of a week (maybe about 20 hours worth) and will probably not play it again. I would feel I got my moneyâ??s worth for $10. Definitely not for $25. At the current price I would have to say DO NOT BUY THIS GAME!!

And here are just some of the reasons:
The game is FAR too easy. The only way you can lose is by being in debt for a total of 6 months. No problem, though. Just save your game and exit. When you return to the game youâ??ll have a brand new 6 months awaiting you.
There are so many problems with the management portion of this game I donâ??t even know where to begin. I think the best way to explain it is just to say the whole thing is a silly mess.
So now Iâ??ll talk about what is really the secondary aspect of this game: the actual fighting. First, when you set up a fight you have the option of either simming or watching. You donâ??t actually get to throw punches, which is fine because it is a managing game and not a fighting game. As for simming, all you need to know is that if your boxer is far superior to his opponent in the stats, heâ??ll almost always win. If it looks to be a close match youâ??re better off watching.
When you watch you have 3 buttons you can push to â??manageâ?? the fight. The first one determines whether you want to hit head, body, or mixed. The second is whether you want to fight offensively, defensively, or move around a bunch. These two buttons work very much in conjunction with one another. I never saw an advantage to using movement so I pretty much went with offense or defense, along with head or body. Basically, in each fight youâ??ll be able to find which combination of these two buttons seems to give your fighter the most hits on his opponent, and when you find it you can stick with it for most of the rest of the fight.
The third button is your corner coaching: incite, normal, or heal. Through most of the fight this ends up set on heal, because even if you are beating the tar out of your opponent youâ??ll see your boxerâ??s condition deteriorating rapidly if you are not healing him. By the way, although you can see where your fighter has been hurt, you cannot see where your opponent has been hurt so you cannot adjust your strategy to accommodate this.
During the fight youâ??ll see three bars for you and three for your opponent. The first bar is strength, the second is health, and the third is speed. Speed doesnâ??t make any difference. No difference. None. At all. Health makes some difference at the lower ranks because when the health bar gets really, really low it may be time for a knock out. At the higher rankings, though, health doesnâ??t really mean much because it is rare that youâ??ll see this bar get low enough, long enough to actually make a difference. However, you will see plenty of random knock downs regardless. The strength bar is the only one that truly matters, but it is still problematic. Higher strength means you hurt your opponent more and can get his health lower, quicker. The problem is that the strength bar is never dramatically affected during a fight. After 10 rounds of beating the tar out of your opponent, if you came in with less strength â?? youâ??ll still have less strength. So the lesson to be learned with strength is: donâ??t choose a weak fighter.
So thatâ??s pretty much how you fight. When fighting an opponent with stats that are basically even to your fighterâ??s, the victory will be rather random, although the game definitely weighs it in your favor. You will experience several random knockdowns which will keep the score close. I once had a fight where my guy held a hit lead of probably 50, but lost in points due to a rash of random knockdowns. This is rare, though. Fights in which you should be winning but find yourself behind on the card likely end in a sudden and inexplicable TKO in your favor. I won on numerous TKOâ??s, most of which the ref just called out of the blue. One time my fighter was clearly losing the fight AND lying flat on his back when the ref decided that my opponent had taken too much pummeling and called the fight in my guyâ??s favor. On another occasion, I was losing the fight, losing the last round, and with only 10 seconds left I got the magic TKO. I probably watched around 70 fights and never once had a TKO called against me. Also, you should know that the end scoring makes absolutely no sense. If the score is close going into the final round, you can pretty much expect the fight to be called a draw.
Again I should note that the fighting is the secondary aspect of this game. My entire review focused on the fighting aspect for the simple reason that I could explain all of the numerous things that were wrong with the fighting in a brief â?? ok, not so brief â?? time. Trying to describe all the many ways in which the primary aspect of this game â?? the management portion â?? completely sucks would take volumes, and only describing a few of the ways in which it sucks would not do the suckage justice.

So hereâ??s the deal. If you buy this game you may find yourself enjoying it enough that you play until you have several boxers in the top 10 in their weights. Thatâ??s what I did. I played about 7 game years of one career. I had a couple top 20 boxers, a top 10 boxer, and a number 1 boxer. I had one boxer who started from scratch who was the only fighter that I actually still enjoyed watching his fights simply because he generally knocked out his opponent in the first 3 rounds. Then suddenly, at 7-0, moving up the ranks and at the ripe old age of 20, he retired. I doubt Iâ??ll play this game again. I certainly could not imagine why someone would want to play multiple careers the way people do with games that are actually, you know, good.

Pros

Well, I did manage to play it for several hours over a handful of days.

Cons

The game is FAR too easy.

You may see some flowery reviews on a few different sites, but this game is as basic as they come.

A few years into your first career, you'll have mastered this game and accomplished all there is to accomplish. This is NOT what I look for in a game that costs me $25.

Pros

Great stradegy Game-Play, not just MANAGING skills but picking your FIGHTERS tactic each round. Such as, how well you budget your self not to be in BANKRUPT, Then picking which FIGHTERS to INVEST in. Each of your FIGHTERS is EFFECTIVE by you, in two main ways. How well their FITNESS is, and how much MORALE support you give your FIGHTER. Also, I like to include is how you strategize your FIGHTER in each round in many different ways. You get to pick 3 out of the 9 types to fight in each round by choosing the following;

[1] Hit the opponent in the CHEST, HEAD or MIXED.

[2] What mode you going fight, like DEFENCE, OFFENSE or MOVEMENT ( movement is more like neutral).

[3] Are you going to fight NORMAL, INCITE or HEAL.

Cons

The graphics look a little TACKY. The view of the camera once the fighters are fighting is looking down at them. Meaning you are at sky level, looking down. Another issue is that you can't actually fight for your fighter, you just pick out the STRADEGY how to fight.