Atari brings the beloved Ready 2 Rumble boxing series to with Wii with Ready 2 Rumble Revolution, possibly the most egregious waste of Frankenreview chart real estate this year.
The Ready 2 Rumble series follows a pretty standard formula. Take a bunch of colorful boxer stereotypes, mix in a few celebrity caricatures, and toss them into the ring to duke it out. That simple formula led to the original Ready 2 Rumble on the Sega Dreamcast becoming one of the few Sega All Stars titles released for the console. With such a simple formula, how could Atari and famed wrestling developer AKI possibly screw up the Wii version?
Read on and find out.
Game Informer
ever in my wildest dreams did I think I'd encounter a game so thoroughly terrible. Where do I even start? The racial stereotypes? The positively broken controls? The revolting art design?
Eurogamer
You get Brad Pitt as he appeared in Snatch (2000), Jack Black in a schoolboy uniform (School of Rock, presumably - 2003), David Beckham with a mohawk (2001), and portly liggers John Travolta and David Hasselhoff, whose irrelevance is a universal constant. It feels like a missed opportunity. They're passably amusing likenesses of a bunch of pretty famous people, but there's nothing especially exciting about making them beat the crap out of each other; nothing with the stellar irreverence of making Gordon Ramsay tussle with Vladimir Putin, say, or having Barack Obama punch Lily Allen's lights out.
VideoGamer.com
The game comes crashing down like a pack of virtual cards, however, when you leave the tutorial mode and start fighting AI controlled opponents. To do a hard punch you need to move the Wii Remote or Nunchuck to the right or left first, then do another movement. So, for a heavy right hand uppercut, you need to move the Wii Remote to the right, then up. Actions like these give the Wii an embolism. It simply can't work out what you're trying to do. 90 per cent of the time your caricature of a boxer (based on racial stereotypes and celebrities, two of our favourite things) will do a move in direct opposition to the one desired.
IGN
Ready 2 Rumble Revolution isn't one of the worst looking games on the Wii, but it certainly is one of the worst playing games on the system. Any potential the game design has is totally thrown out the window because the developers insisted on Wii motion control that required far more out of the remote and nunchuk than what they're capable of pulling off. It's an unnecessarily frustrating experience trying to work your way through the ranks – you'll be fighting the controls more than you're fighting the characters.
Only four sources this time around, but you get the idea.