Rocky Legends

7.0
Good

Gameplay	0.0	"Very few low blows to speak of in this Rocky Legends review."
Graphics	0.0
Sound	0.0
Value	0.0

By Morgan Bates

Starring and created by Sylvester Stallone, the Rocky movies have been around for well over ten years now. They are based around a boxer named Rocky Balboa and follow his career over a few years, from a rookie to a world champion boxer. Rocky Legends is the latest game based on the Rocky license and features a hand full of movie trailers unlock, as well as music from the various movies such as Rocky's entrance music 'Gonna Fly Now' and several extra boxers.

Upon booting up the game you are treated to a nice FMV sequence showing of just how bad the games character models look in comparison to the movies, said FMV consists of short video clips from the movies playing in the background, with Rocky and a few other models doing various things in front of them. Once in the menu screen you get footage from the Rocky movies in the background along with Rocky theme music, aside from the regular single player fight modes you get the shop where you unlock the extras and below that is the extras menu where you access the trailer, boxer bios and entrance themes of the boxers.

The single player game modes are all standard modes for fighting games; Career mode allows you to play through any given fighters career while raising your boxer's stats and earning money to unlock extra features. Exhibition match allows you to pair up any available fighters. Knockout Tournament is a standard tournament mode where you fight opponent after opponent for money until you win, or are knocked out of the tournament. Last is Survival mode, this mode must be unlocked in the shop for the reasonable price of $150,000.

There are no big name boxers like Mike Tyson or David Tua to speak of here, as the main attraction of Rocky Legends, is of course, being able to play as most, if not all of the boxers from the Rocky movies and getting to KO anyone you do not like from the series. There are just eight fighters available straight away, with the rest available to unlock in the aforementioned shop.

The controls in Rocky Legends are very responsive; you have high jab, low jab, high straight and low straight. If you do not like the layout, you can change them in the options menu. The difference between a straight and a jab is just in power and speed, for example, jabs are faster but have less power behind them than straight punches, so they do less damage but you can throw more of them then you would straight punches. Pressing up or down on the D-pad or analog stick will also have an effect on the straight or jab you throw, for example; pressing up and head straight or body straight will make you do an attack to your opponents right. While pressing up and head jab or body jab will make you do a jab to your opponents left. You can also pull off some big hits by pressing R1 followed by a head or body straight.

The graphics in Rocky Legends are great for the most part. The boxers are modeled well (although they look bad compared to FMV at the start) with only a few traces of aliasing and the animation is smooth enough, although there are a few cases of clipping, when your and your opponent's arms go straight through each other's. The rings look good, except in some cases when fans throw bottles in the ring the glass fragments disappear to prevent slowdown and bruises show up on faces as boxer accumulate damage.

The sound effects in this game are really a mixed bag, for example; the voice acting on the announcer seems a little off and the lip-synching is awful. On the other hand, the music is great and suits the Rocky franchise perfectly; featuring every fighters entrance music. The grunts and wolf whistles in this game are also nice and realistic.

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