Rocky Legends - Its as Good as the Films weren't! (Rocky Legends (PS2))

Member Name: garethro55

Product:	Rocky Legends (PS2)
Date:	14/02/05 (261 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Its always Good to Kick Sly's Ass

Disadvantages: Graphics are very poor, The Game itself is quite Dull, The Music is diabolical

Rocky Legends

Obviously, you remember the Rocky Films with Sly Stallone, Mr T etc, now comes the second game, which I have to admit I have been secretly awaiting purposely for Clubber Lang (Mr T). I’m not particularly fond of boxing games in general but the thought of knocking the hell out of Sly using the ultra cool Clubber Lang appeals to me greatly, so I bought this before running like a child across ASDA car park to get home to carry out the long awaited beating.

Rocky Legends is an Arcade Boxer, plain and simple, there are your usual modes such as single career, Exhibition, Two player vs ,Championship Tournament mode, and Survival mode. My first obvious selection was career mode where I chose Clubber Lang as my fighter. Most boxers are available from the Rocky films, such as Ivan Drago, Tommy Gunn, Apollo Creed etc but most have to be unlocked first.

When the game starts you are presented with a very brief insight into your fighters character, with very poor graphics and terrible voice overs. In brief you start at the bottom of your career and work your way up until you can qualify to compete for the Champsionship. Square,Triangle, circle, and X act as simple left head jab, right head jab, right body jab, and left body jab whilst pressing these with up or down throws a swing at the same target. R1 and any jab throws and uppercut and Left buttons are for blocking, Swaying, and counters attacks. It really is very basic, the character animations are slow and very poor quality they barely resemble their acting counterparts. Moving your character is ,again, slow and linking jabs proves a task for a beginner.

Once Clubber Lang was pulverised by his opposition, i restarted the game and chose Rocky. After a hilariously bad voice over of Sly Stallone I managed to beat my opponent and go back for a training session after the match. The sessions are varied in style, if you want to increase your speed there's a speedbag minigame to do it. Want to increase his stamina? There's a jump rope game for that. There's even the chicken-chasing exercise from Rocky II to take part in. You can build up your stats and become hard as nails eventually work you way up the ladder to become champion.

There are combos to learn, but they are nothing new and quite hard to get in without repeated practicing. There are also special combos for each character, pressing R1 and a punch button when your crowd bar (a little bar that measures your efforts) gets to the top and starts flashing throws a very sluggish powerful punch or combo when combo*3 is activated, which admittedly looks good if your lucky enough to land it.

When you do get the hang of this game its quite good, you can absolutely batter people and K.O them in one round if you get hard enough. But you will soon get bored, as not much changes throughout playing the game with each fighter (and there are many). The training sessions become tedious (you can do them on auto) and the other game modes aren't much fun. Comparing this Boxer to other leading Boxing games on the market would be embarassing for creaters Ubisoft. Overall this game is dull and predictable, its graphics are poor and the sound dire the playability is okay but it won't last longer than two weeks.

Summary: