So I’ve reviewed games like this before, on my previous site. I was actually pretty positive about them. Specifically I had looked at the first Fitness Boxing, as well as Ring Fit Adventure. Both are solid workouts. One I didn’t review is the sequel to Fitness Boxing… I wanted to, but I just kinda forgot. And now I’ve moved over to this game, for now, so it would be a bit weird to plop out a Fitness Boxing 2 review now.

I do like having some workout games, because I’m a big boy and I need to be healthier and move around some, you know. Just working out normally bores me, but doing it in the context of a game definitely helps.

This is gonna be a short review, and I’ll have a portion to talk about Fitness Boxing 2, as they’re similar games stuff to talk about. Let’s go!

Developer: Pocket
Publisher: XSEED Games/Marvelous Inc.
Release date: September 28th 2021
Platforms: Switch
Genre: Fitness

So what drew me into trying this one out, despite having been playing Fitness Boxing 2 regularly, is that it seemed to have more types of workouts than Fitness Boxing 2. This is a workout game, that uses a very simple method to make you move (if correct joy-con is moving, it’s a hit… very very simplistic). It has these 2 bars with 8 circles, each of which may have a circle in it that will tell you what you need to do for that beat, with wording, and a half circle, blue to the left or pink to the right, to signal which hand needs to do the action (yes, hand… it can get a bit awkward because some moves require moving, say, the right hand but the left leg). The action you need to do is just written as a word in the circle, so if it says jab with a blue half-circle on the left, you jab with the left hand. Simple enough… But I will try to explain a problem with this system a bit later. Anyways, there’s a crosshair that moves along the 2 bars to a set rhythm, so when it gets to a circle, that’s the timing you need to do the move on. A few moves to have some “prep”, so you can look at your trainer and mimic his/her movement to be sure you’re moving at the right time.

Moves are pretty varied. You have all the standard boxing stuff, which you do in both orthodox and southpaw stance. Uppercuts, hooks, straights (here called crosses), jabs, ducking, guarding and such. No steps though, which is interesting. Then there’s Muay Thai moves, with kicks, elbow and knee strikes. One thing that’s new compared to Fitness Boxing is karate moves. There’s some exercise sets that will go through orthodox and southpaw sets, but then a third set will be a karate stance set. You go wide, with your fists to the side. There’s punches, twists, double side punch things (I feel these have to be… completely useless), squats, forearm blocks and rising blocks. I’m AWFUL at these, but getting better. It’s cool that there’s something completely different. There’s some moves that the game can’t detect motion-wise, so the game just assumes you did them (and they’re not counted as part of the combo). Stuff like kicks and such.

So the game is… extremely barebones. You have basically 2 options. There’s the daily workout, which you should probably do, then there’s the separate workout mode, where you can do individual workouts. I do 40 minutes of this each time I do it, so after the daily (which goes from 10 to 30 minutes depending on setting), I do a bunch of individual workouts. The daily mode is where you unlock more workouts, so you really should do it to get more variety. And that’s that. Once you’re done, you can look at the calendar screen from the main menu to look at the time you spent today.

What I mean about it being barebones is that there’s not much to unlock or anything. You unlock new workout sets every time you do the daily workout, you start with one trainer and have 45 more you can unlock (just by completing enough workout sets), songs to unlock (which you’ll basically get by unlocking workouts), and studios to unlock, which… are lame and don’t really do much. And that’s it. No achievement system if you care about that stuff, just doing your workout.

On the accessibility side, I think the game needs colorblind mode. Yeah, actually accessibility talk, let’s go! Better than game journos whining that games are hard and should have options to skip the game entirely in the name of so-called “accessibility”, right? … I should write about accessibility at some point… Anyways… Yeah, so one of the studios is a dark background with pink and blue lights, but the icons for punches are also the same shades of pink and blue. Might make things hard to see for some people. Also the wording on the circles feel like it’s not quite enough. Like, “Kick” and “Knee” look kinda similar at a quick glance, so you might do the wrong move. Even the colors and half-circles to tell which arm to use is a bit funky even to me, I’ve punched with the wrong hand many times. There’s solutions to a lot of these, I have talked about this to other people with accessibility issues. Namely, the circle being a circle may be… eh. A diamond or something might make things easier. Then, supplementing the wording in the circle with an icon would help. This is a weird thing, each move DOES have icons, but only in the menus… I’m sure there’s a good way to implement these into the rhythm game, like how Fitness Boxing has different icons for different punches. And then the way the circles are displayed in the first place is a bit funky, those 2 rows with the moving crosshair is a bit of a weird choice. I’m not quite sure what the best solution is, the way Fitness Boxing does it is great, maybe a “Taiko no Tatsujin” style thing could work, I dunno.  And yeah, as I said at the top of this paragraph, colorblind options. Definitely some work that could be put in a sequel.

This or Fitness Boxing 2?

Fitness Boxing 2 has some differences. First, there’s a bit more content to it, like you can customize a workout set and have costume parts you can unlock to change the look of your trainers and so on. It is, overall, more polished than this game. Also the music is focused on midi renditions of known pop songs, while Knockout is all original songs I think.

So it depends what you prefer, the more varied workout of this game, or the more polished presentation and content of Fitness Boxing 2.

Overall

Despite how barebones this game is, I do enjoy the workout more than Fitness Boxing. It’s faster, more intense than Fitness Boxing, and there’s more varied moves and such. I’m enjoying it, it’s definitely more demanding and leaves me way more tired by the end, with the same play time.

I’m still very much learning as far as some of the moves, specifically the karate moves, but I’m having fun.

As far as recommending this kind of game… I’d recommend trying out the demos, I think they all have one, other than Ring Fit which requires the ring obviously. But Ring Fit, Fitness Boxing and Knockout Home Fitness are all good stuff as far as I’m concerned. Choose one, or many, whatever. If you’re not moving, you need to move, so grab one of these games. Gotta lose that weight and build that muscle.