I have quite a few fond memories of playing several boxing games of yesteryear. The titles that spring to mind for me are Ready 2 Rumble Boxing and its sequel on the original PlayStation, as well as the Nintendo GameCube port of EA’s Fight Night Round 2. Of these three, I enjoyed the first two so much because of their cartoony characters and the fact that legendary boxing announcer Michael Buffer lent his unmistakable voice and catchphrase (“Let’s get ready to rumble!”) to each in-game match-up.

Beyond that, I liked the GameCube port of Fight Night Round 2 primarily because it contained the Super Punch-Out!! version of series protagonist Little Mac as a playable character. I always thought this was a nice way of paying homage to Nintendo’s boxing titles. Granted, I never really considered myself particularly skilled at titles like Ready 2 Rumble Boxing or Fight Night when I originally played them.

I eventually became pretty decent at all three Punch-Out!! games, though that’s mostly because each opponent you face in those titles has their own unique patterns you can learn and exploit to counter them. The game I’ll be reviewing today, Big Rumble Boxing: Creed Champions, constitutes the first new boxing game I’ve played in several years. I’m excited to dive into it and tell you all about what it has to offer, so let’s begin, shall we?

Creed Champions is a boxing game set in the Rocky film universe. That is to say, it follows the stories of such memorable characters from the movies as Ivan Drago, Clubber Lang, and of course, Rocky “The Italian Stallion” Balboa himself. Each playable boxer has their own “tower” in the game’s arcade mode that sees them relive a selection of their most memorable bouts within the squared circle.

I’d say the arcade mode present within Creed Champions is its main attraction, as well as the closest thing it offers to a tutorial. To its credit, the game does have a “how to play” section available on its main menu. However, all it does is provide images of the default control scheme and brief explanations as to how certain mechanics function. If you want to practice your moves as your favorite boxer, you can try out the training mode or just jump straight into arcade mode.

When you first start out in the game’s arcade mode, you have a total of ten boxers available with a further ten that you’ll have to unlock as you play. Now, I’m not an expert on the canon established within the Rocky films by any stretch of the imagination. Having said that, the only names I recognized among the initial ten playable fighters are Ivan Drago’s son Viktor, Apollo Creed’s son Adonis, and Rocky himself. So, for my first run through arcade mode, I went the most obvious route and chose Rocky.

This leads me to one of the few aspects I’ve found that I dislike about Creed Champions. On at least one occasion during each boxer’s arcade mode tower that I’ve completed, I’ve had to play through what I can only think to describe as a training montage of sorts. That is, you’ll have to rapidly input several button prompts to correctly perform various types of exercises with the ultimate goal of scoring as many points as you can during each training minigame.

I readily admit that I could be wrong about this, but as far as I can tell, there doesn’t appear to be any real in-fight benefit to attaining a high score during these training montages, much less a point to going through them at all. It seems to me as though these portions of gameplay exist entirely to pad out the length of each fighter’s arcade mode. Unless I’m proven to be incorrect about that, that’s the sole reason why I dislike this gameplay mechanic so much.

While you’re in arcade mode, if you’re not training or going through a segment of dialogue, chances are you’re probably boxing. As you might reasonably expect of a boxing game, the fights are where Creed Champions truly shines. I suspect I may encounter some degree of difficulty explaining precisely why, but I’ll do my best to explain. To begin, each punch either competitor throws seems to feel like it has a proper amount of force behind it, regardless of whether it hits its mark or ends up being blocked.

For example, you won’t find that simply landing a light jab does more damage or causes your opponent to stagger more than a full-power uppercut or hook would. However, that’s also not to say your jabs and other less-powerful punches serve little to no purpose. After all, you most likely shouldn’t leave your corner when the match begins and immediately start wildly throwing more intense, powerful punches that your foe can easily predict and consequently block or avoid. As I said, each punch you throw and block looks and feels as it should, at least as far as I’ve discovered up to this point.

If you’re the type of player who throws the more powerful punches and stays on the offensive more often regardless of any potential consequences, you might be pleased to find that there’s no such thing as a finite stamina meter to penalize you for doing so. The closest mechanic Creed Champions features to something like that is actually a guard meter, which punishes players who spend too much time blocking incoming blows rather than putting up much of a fight.

If you try and block an incoming punch with a depleted guard meter, the blow will likely connect despite your attempted deflection and you’ll be temporarily dazed. This grants your opponent a precious second or two to wail on you uninterrupted provided they know how to take advantage of that small time window. What I’ve found to be an exceptionally effective way of capitalizing upon dazed opponents is the “Super Move” mechanic.

During the course of a bout, you’ll see a “Super” meter in the bottom left corner of your screen. Filling that meter completely will allow you to unleash a devastating Super Move upon your opponent. That is, provided you can actually land such a maneuver. Incoming Super Moves can be thwarted in one of three ways: they can be blocked, dodged, or countered if your adversary initiates their Super Move just before yours would have connected. The game rather amusingly refers to this last method of avoidance as “stealing thunder.”

The main thing I want to address in my closing statements about Creed Champions hearkens back to something I said earlier in this review. I do wholeheartedly believe that the game’s arcade mode is its main attraction, and the game expertly does everything I would think it needs to do in that regard. However, I fear that the arcade mode being its main attraction may translate into arcade mode becoming its only attraction.

Once you’ve beaten arcade mode enough times with enough boxers to unlock the entire roster and their alternate ring attire, I’m not sure there will be much single-player content that remains available and appealing. However, to its credit, Big Rumble Boxing: Creed Champions also features a versus mode, as well as Steam’s wonderful Remote Play Together feature.

These factors work in tandem to allow you to duke it out as any playable boxer against any of your friends who want to give this title a shot for themselves. As an added bonus, the fact that the game features Remote Play Together ensures that your friends don’t have to own the game to play against you. I just hope the single-player content combined with the Versus mode will be enough to justify the game’s somewhat hefty forty-dollar price tag.

A PC review key for Big Rumble Boxing: Creed Champions was provided by Survios, Inc. for this review.

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Big Rumble Boxing: Creed Champions

$39.99

8.5

Score

8.5/10

Pros

• Excellent Homage to the Classic Rocky Films
• Fighting Feels as Weighty and Forceful As You Might Expect
• Plenty of Single-Player Content

Cons

• Lacks a Fully-Fledged Tutorial
• Training Montage Segments Feel Unnecessary
• Finite Single-Player Content May Not Be Satisfying On Its Own