Ready 2 Rumble Revolution Review

This past week at work sucked for me. This is why this past weekend I was excited to try out the Nintendo Wii’s latest boxing title, Ready to Rumble Revolution (by Atari). It would allow me to relieve some stress and have some fun punching somebody’s lights out.

With the latest incarnation by Atari, Ready to Rumble Revolution makes its way onto the Nintendo Wii console. If you were a fan of Midway’s original Ready to Rumble Boxing, or the follow up Ready to Rumble Round 2, there is definitely a striking resemblance. Both those previous games had a sizable following and accounted for countless hours of button mashing good times.

Here are my quick thoughts on the game.

Things we liked about Ready to Rumble Revolution

• As with many Wii titles, R2R is fun to play because of the shear fact that it begs you to stand up, move the coffee table a little and be a little physical. It requires you to be very active and is a different experience than sitting and button mashing on other consoles.
• Tons of outrageous special moves, combos and extreme knockdowns enhance the fighting experience while “Rumble“-Combos enable players to pull off moves from Kung Fu, Wrestling and other martial arts.
• I liked that the game doesn’t take itself too seriously.  From the parodied celebs, and the entertaining Las Vegas fight-night type sound, it makes for a fun atmosphere.
• R2R has 8 Different Game modes including Arcade, Quick Fight, Team Fight, Tournament, Championship, Mini Game, Tutorial and Create a Boxer mode so you’ll always have lots of variety.

Things we didn’t like about Ready to Rumble Revolution

• Despite the hardy tutorial R2R offers, when it came down to actual gameplay, R2R suffers.
• The controller maneuvers took too much time, were a bit complex and just messed up the the flow of the game too much. It appears they went a little overboard with the amount of controller combinations. It felt like the Wii was unable to accurately pickup all the moves I was doing and in the end left me trying to just simplify my attack against the opponent.
• Trying to throw punching combinations was very difficult and seemingly impossible. Boxing games like this should be easier to play.

Overall

There are a lot of things to like about Ready to Rumble Revolution like the caricatured celebs and longtime ring announcer Michael Buffer saying, “Let’s get ready to rumble!”, but R2R falls short in the most important category and that is gameplay. It was fun initially and allows for an entertaining couple of hours, but the controls and moves proved to be too complicated to get the most enjoyment out of the game.