Yeah, thought I forgot about these? I'm just lazy. There's a reason there's a tag for posts called "laziness".
Name:
On the RopesPrice: $18.22 (as of 12/1; review text has an earlier price from when the price was lower)
What we got here is a 3D first person boxing game. Actually, this game feels a lot like the western version of the
Pine series, so I'm probably going to be comparing them throughout a little bit. In fact, these are both first-person boxing games where you nail the girl if you beat her - but where Pine is a blonde cartoon, this lady is a blonde 3D Poser model. Hmm.
When you launch the game, you've got just Tutorial, Start, and Exit. The Tutorial is, uh, a tutorial, and Exit quits. Start puts you into the ring with your opponent:
The bar at the top is her life, and the bottom is yours. During the match, buttons appear on the screen, her attacks or yours. Click on the button to either block her punch, or hit her yourself, that's all there is to it. Whoever runs out of life first loses.
The game's difficulty seems balanced just about right, which is to say I lose about as often as I win. I've found that if you have trouble, keeping the mouse moving or hovering over her face can help. Unfortunately, most of the actual gameplay is just waiting for the buttons appear, which isn't terribly thrilling. The only thing happening on the screen is your opponent breathing and your hands moving slightly while you wait for a button to show up. You can't take her top off during the match or anything like that - it's very straightforward.
I have to say I do prefer
Knuckle Pine's more turn-based boxing more relaxing and easier to enjoy, but this game does rectify one of my complaints about that series, which is that
Knuckle Pine is all luck - this game's all dependent on your skill. So marks for that, I guess, but I'm not a big fan of twitch reactions, which is what you'll need for the buttons.
So that's the match. If you lose, you just fall over, and she stands over you while the screen fades for like three seconds, and you can try again, or not. I'm going to make the same criticism as the Pine games here, which is, why doesn't anything happen to you if you lose? Hmph.
Anyway, if you win, your opponent gets thrown - yes -
on the ropes:
Clicking any of the icons punches here there. On all these screens, you can punch her as long as you'd like, but it's the same animation and sound effect all the time, so it gets old pretty fast. (Since there's a sound effect for each button, maybe they could be randomized.)
When you're ready to move on, clicking on her chest removes her top, which gives you another menu.
Same as before, although now you can punch her in the tits, and I recommend you do, because the animation for it is hilarious. I don't know how to make an animated GIF, so I tried to capture how it looks with this screenshot, but you probably gotta see it to believe it.
Anyways, from here you pull off her bottoms, and then you can stick it in. This removes the punch icons (thankfully) and gives you two: One of a hammer - I have no idea what this does; I assume clicking on it makes you thrust faster - and one a little white fountain. Click that, and you spurt on her crying face.
Nice.
And that's it, it just takes you to a "AGAIN?" screen. There's nothing else to the game; It's lacking the Pine game's endless boxing or jump straight to the end mode, which I think is a shame. unfortunately, there's basically no replay value, since there's only one girl, and only one set of things you can do to her, and you'll have to go through the not particularly thrilling boxing match itself to do them again.
Overall, I think this is a good first effort, but there's some definite room for improvement. To begin with, taking the endless boxing mode and skipping straight to the end aspects of Knuckle Pine would do alot to give the game some more bang for the buck; I also think a discount may be in order, considering the compitition - as of right now the game costs $17, which is the same as the
latest Pine game, which I think you'll get a lot more playtime out of. It's hard to recommend at this price, and I think cutting it by 3 or 4 dollars would go a long way towards making this game more attractive. All in all, though, this game just needs maybe a few extra girls and a few extra things to do to them, and we might have a winner. In fact, if it's too much work to make extra girls, how about some basic things like changing her hair, etc?
Can I also make a suggestion to both this and the Pine series: How about an option to make the player a woman? We're not all mixed fans. Well, I guess that might not work in the ending. I dunno. I'm just spitballin'. New boot goofin'. Probably time to wrap this up.
Recommended? Sure, if you know what you're getting into. You read the whole review, right?
