FOX Sports Boxing Review

Anannya Sen’s Review

A decent attempt at a boxing game for your phone. Variety of moves and options, but the playability could be improved.

I'm a boxing game fan from back in the days of the Commodore 64 with Frank Bruno's boxing (who remembers Fling Long Chop??) and so was eager to see what Sorrent's latest sports game was like.

I like Sorrent, they try and do decent sports sims and the 3-D aspects are nice, but Fox Boxing falls down on a few counts.

The game is a straightforward boxing game. Buttons 1-6 do different moves and you can choose your defensive strategy at the start of each round. The character autoblocks and there are little energy bars. Win on points or by KO or TKO to progress up the levels of 3 different rankings.

The graphics are ok. The point of view is from the character's gloves (ie your gloves) and so you see your hands moving, plus the opponent. The opponent is nicely animated, although in the amateur level, the 5 opponents only ever seemed to have one of 2 faces. One of which looks like Billy Zane and the other looks like Eddie Guerrero (viva la rasa). Weird. Animations of punches are ok, if a little slow at times, and the background is just a black one with the FOX boxing logo which you get to see when you knock your opponent down. When you get knocked down yourself, the POV changes nicely to make it seem as if you have hit the canvas.

There is no sound. Why is there no sound? Not even some hitting or impact sounds, not even a variation on the Rocky theme.

The controls appear straightforward but are slightly unresponsive. Buttons 1-6 do different moves, jab, uppercut, flurry etc. Apparently left and right on the D-pad make you sway but this never seemed to have any effect for me. Blocking is automatic and dependant on the strategy you selected at the start of each round. You can have a manual strategy and press down to change it, but this again didn't seem to do much. When knocked down, you have to rapidly press 0 to build your bar up again to get up, and the more times you get knocked down, the harder it is to get up again.

The playability is ok. The game is fun at first, but suffers slightly on the randomness. The moves come out slightly delayed as mentioned above and what this leads to is that when you are rapidly punching and you switch to a different type of punch, it may not be instant as you're still finishing the moves which were input previously. Eg if you press 1 for jab loads of times, it will register one jab for each press, but will be slow to come out. Then when you switch to uppercut (6) it won't be straightaway as it will still be jabbing from all your button presses. This also gives rise to the problem that if you punch too much, you leave yourself open to be hit. Another issue I had is that many moves don't seem to connect easily. While I got through all of amateur by just using the uppercut when the opponent was in the centre of the screen (6), the other moves didn't seem to work at all and the opponent was weaving and dodging. The jab and flurries seemed to have no effect which left me perplexed. There are 3 difficulty levels with high scores kept. You have two attempts to beat the person in the rank above you to progress. The game saves as well at the end of each match which is good, and autopauses when suspended. The points scoring is pretty accurate and sometimes it's quite tense as you wait to see if you've won on points. Knockdowns and punches landed (out of punches thrown) all have an effect which is good. Also there are 4 rounds of 60 seconds each so the game isn't that long. Another small gripe I have is that your opponent always seems to recover much better than you do after getting knocked down or between rounds. Seems the odds are stacked against you.

The lastability is where the game may be good. While I didn't really get into it that much, I am sure that the other moves are useful and take a while to learn, as does the sway. With the various defense options, including the manual one, and three difficulty settings with high scores as well, there is plenty to keep you going. That is, if you like the game.

Overall a decent attempt at a boxing game, but they should have done a version of Frank Bruno's boxing as it would have been more fun, 'know what I mean Harry!'