Bare Butt Boxing (PC) Preview

The world of Early Access games is often rife with shovelware and forgettable titles that have a few beats, but not much else to it. However, this is not the case for the surprising sleeper hit that came across my desk called Bare Butt Boxing. A lot of games these days try to push the envelope with realism or put copious amounts of microtransactions into their games. As a result, there aren’t too many that are willing to let you loosen up after a stressful day and make you chuckle with friends. That void has now been partially filled by the ridiculously cartoonish fighting game that we are discussing today.

Developed by TuaTara Games, the developers of 2017’s Let Them Come, Bare Butt Boxing “is a multiplayer PvP brawler game” that is defined by its floppy physics and crazy cast of playable characters. Giving off vibes similar to Fall Guys and Gang Beasts, Bare Butt Boxing drops players into a rotation of maps with the goal of punching your opponents into rings that are set up on different areas of the map.

Hitting your opponents into these rings will grant you points. Conversely, getting hit into a ring by another player will lose you points. There are also various hazards on each map that will cause havoc to you or your enemies should you not be careful with your footing. Each match lasts three minutes.

The characters that exist in the game are fairly basic with only a limited amount of customization. However, that is something that the developers say will improve over time. The characters are Wirebot, Fishy, Froggy, Skelly, Tallbot, and Maurice. Each of these characters has three skins, nineteen glove designs, and three title card looks.

The only cosmetic type that is shared amongst these six characters is the nineteen glove designs. Every skin and title card look is currently unique to each boxer. The way to unlock all of these is by earning tokens by playing matches. After playing for about an hour, I had about 300 tokens from the various matches I played.

As of right now, Bare Butt Boxing is in a state where it tends to be reliant on you having a group of friends to play the game with. There aren’t too many people flooding the servers, which is why the few reviews that exist on Steam seem to be rather mixed. The developers have recently added a feature that fills games with AI players in order to allow anyone to play at any time.

Sadly, the AI players are extremely stupid and don’t put up much of a fight. Playing with friends is a total blast and works a lot better than I was expecting. There is currently no party system or even a way to host your own private session, but I imagine that will change as the developers receive more feedback from the growing community.

Since the size of the community is one of the key concerns surrounding the game, the developers have shared their overall strategy as to how they plan to increase the player base. They state on their Steam page that they will be “doing an influencer marketing campaign ahead of the EA launch, hosting various friendly competitions during EA, being active on the Steam community forums to seek feedback and inform the community of upcoming updates and balance changes, doing dev streams and frequently playing together with the community.” Additionally they will also “be launching a line of physical products to further engage with the community.”

The controls in Bare Butt Boxing are very simple and work well for both controller and mouse & keyboard. My friends and I all seemed to think that playing the game with a controller allowed for a smoother and better experience overall. However, I was still able to wipe the floor quite a few times while playing with a mouse & keyboard.

The fact that the controls work well for both options means that the audience for this game will not be limited by how comfortable they are with one compared to the other. This gives the developers the ability to attract a majority of the gaming market with this game rather than be relegated to those who prefer one control scheme over the other.

As things stand right now, I believe that this is the perfect party game to get to play with your friends. While it will probably take a bit of time before the community grows enough to have public matches going at most times of the day, I have confidence that the team over at TuaTara Games can pull this off. The game plan that they have in motion is one that has been tried and tested by many games before it. The only thing that can hold this game back is the type of people that TuaTara Games gets involved to spread the word about it.

A PC preview copy of Bare Butt Boxing was provided by TuaTara Games for this review.