The post Animal Boxing Review for Nintendo DS appeared first on Cheat Code Central.
Super Animal Punch Out
Animal Boxing isn’t the type of game you see every day: A human lives in a village full of animals. He’s had trouble getting the animals to accept him, and when a boxing gym opens, they all join. Aching for companionship, he decides to give it a try. Through a first-person view, you play as that human.
Save for hunting, Animal Boxing is probably the most fun one can have causing pain to God’s innocent creatures, but it’s more a brief diversion than a game worthy of a serious time investment.
The game’s biggest success is the way it uses the DS’s touch controls to create a truly engrossing fighting system. You rotate the console 180 degrees, so that the touch screen is on top and the regular screen is on bottom. All the action takes place on the touch screen, with the other serving only as a HUD.
A simple tap on your opponent’s body executes a jab, and drawing a line from a side toward the center throws a hook. A line straight up, starting at the bottom-center, triggers an uppercut. You can dodge left and right, and block, using the buttons (D-pad if you’re a leftie). Holding the stylus to the screen before punching will “charge” the blow, making it stronger. The first person to knock the other down three times wins (on rare occasions, the time will run out, and whoever landed the most punches wins).
One extra twist is the anger gauge, which fills a little every time you dodge or suffer a punch (blocks don’t count). When it’s full, the fight will pause for a second as fire starts shooting out of your character’s eyes. Any punches you land, charged or not, are now super-powerful. The only other gimmicks are the power-ups, which you can tap when they pop up to gain life or anger (they’re not really necessary, but don’t hurt the game much). This simple system could easily have been made into a game that’s easy to learn, but difficult and rewarding to master. (It wasn’t, and we’ll get to that in a bit)
Another thing the developers deserve credit for is the fact that, technically, this game is very well-put-together. The touch-screen controls register extremely well and are quite forgiving, with the sole exception being that a slightly crooked uppercut often comes out as a hook. The graphics look terrific, with 3-D cel-shaded character models that each have their own look and personality. You can even create your own (human) boxer.
Sound-wise, Animal Boxing eschews traditional crowd noise in favor of the occasional barnyard-animal sound, which works well with the game’s outlandish sensibilities. The music, mainly hard rock, fits the offbeat mood as well. While the sound effects of blows landing get repetitive, they don’t detract from the gameplay.
Unfortunately, after getting these hard parts done, the developers took little care in balancing and fleshing out the game. Probably the biggest issue is the damage system. There’s no way to punch around a block, and blocked punches do virtually no damage. It’s not so ridiculous that you can land a few hits and then hold block the rest of the match (in our test on a match on the highest skill level, our opponent was able to drain about half our energy over the course of three rounds when we did nothing but block). It is, however, bad enough to make a simple, repetitive strategy enough to win pretty much any fight: Hold block until your opponent punches, and immediately after his hit lands on your gloves, let off a one-two punch. Still caught up in his punch animation, he won’t be able to block or dodge the first punch, and sometimes the second will connect, too.
He can charge his punches, try to hit you in different areas, or whatever else he thinks of. He can even use his amazing ability to dodge even the quickest jabs with perfect accuracy (he will, on your second punch, quite often). You’ll still win, more than likely, and if you don’t, you can always try the also-useful “block a lot, but let off a whole slew of punches when your opponent pauses for a moment” strategy. Whenever you lose, you can simply re-start the match, a feature that might be nice in a more difficult game but that makes little difference here.
Another issue is the anger boost; it’s way too powerful. It’s nice for the game to give people a chance to come back when they’re getting pummeled, and it’s also an incentive to use timed dodges instead of blocks, but when you’re all fiery-eyed, you can do a ridiculous amount of damage in a very short period of time. So can your opponent when his eyes are burning.
Also, there doesn’t seem to be that big of a difference between characters. They vary in their speed, strength, and resistance ability, and they become more aggressive on the higher difficulty settings, but one never gets the sense that certain animals have truly different styles. The animal world seems an obvious place in which to play up differences in personality, size, and survival techniques, so this is a shame.
The final problem is that, overall, the difficulty is way too low. With a minimal grasp of strategy, you can run through the three Championships with ease, and the single-match mode (where you can unlock a bunch of opponents and rings, not that there’s any real difference between them) isn’t any harder. (In multiplayer, of course, the difficulty depends on whom you’re playing, but the blocking quirks get even more annoying when there are two people exploiting them.) Yes, this is a game designed with kids in mind, but even they will likely tire of it quickly, and there’s nothing remotely challenging in store for anyone of a double-digit age.
In the end, Animal Boxing’s main success is that it pioneers a boxing system fit for a better game. Like the Super Smash Bros. series’ special-move system, it has essentially no learning curve, so it’s something we’d like to see again. Animal Boxing itself is, unfortunately, plagued by balance and difficulty problems too severe to forgive.
RATING OUT OF 5 RATING DESCRIPTION 4.2 Graphics
Colorful, unique cel-shaded look. 4.8 Control
A new way of playing that works very well. 3.5 Music / Sound FX / Voice Acting
Animal sounds in a boxing ring? Perfect! The sound effects are a bit bland, though. 2.6
Play Value
Poorly balanced and too easy. It gets old fast.
3.3 Overall Rating – Fair
Not an average. See Rating legend above for a final score breakdown.
Game Features:
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