Rumble Roses XX Review

Date: 4/7/2006

Rumble Roses XX is at once a new wrestling game for the Xbox 360, a demo designed to show off a next-gen system’s ability to realistically portray bouncing breasts, and a junior high school boy’s fantasy. To cover these last two aspects, Rumble Roses XX provides wrestling ladies that cover the spectrum of fetish stereotypes. You’ve got a demure school teacher, an ornery cowgirl, a sexy nurse, a bad girl punk, a school girl, a leather-clad dominatrix, and the list goes on. All are of course quite amply compensated from a mammary perspective and can’t take a step without gyrating something. All of this is well and good, but what about the wrestling?

Yowza.
Well it is obvious that most of this title’s development effort went into building the wrestlers and less into the game itself. The actual wrestling is not too bad, but it’s not really that deep either. There’s one attack button and it is used with the left stick to execute both punches and kicks and another button initiates a grappling move. The right bumper performs a block and if you hit an attack button while blocking your opponent’s attack you’ll perform a reversal and turn the tables on your attacker. Successful strikes fill a special meter that once full enables a special signature attack. Pulling off one of these is a no-brainer – once the meter’s full you just need to press the left bumper. There’s also a “Humiliation Meter” that fills when you string together attacks. Fill this meter and a trigger pull will unleash a special “Humiliation Attack” designed to make the other lady feel decidedly less of one. Lastly there’s a button to initiate a pin, and breaking out of a pin or hold is done by feverishly mashing all of the buttons.

When you’re new to the game you may find yourself taking a beating at first and losing more than your share of matches. Soon enough though you’ll figure out the basic strategy for the matches and after that you’ll hardly ever lose a bout. This transition from punching bag to dominator happens pretty quickly, after which you’ve got the game figured out and it loses its challenge. Once you reach this point the only real motivation to keep playing is to try to earn enough of the in-game equivalent of money to buy all of the swimsuits and costumes available in the game’s store. There are no story or career modes to be found here; just an obscure quest to reach a popularity rating of 100. You reach this rating pretty quickly and when you do it’s a mystery as to what it means. Keep playing at this level and eventually you’ll get a title fight at a random moment, but you won’t know when it’s coming or why. The game is no help on these points as feedback is non-existent and the manual doesn’t provide any clues.

In fact the whole game is held together by a bare-bones and obscure menu and navigation system. It would have been nice for the developers to put a little effort into the game’s presentation outside of the matches. It seems as if they figured that people would buy the game for the women no matter how minimal and confusing the interface, so why bother putting any work into it? You’re presented with a 2D “map” which has little icons that represent the game’s small handful of arenas, the store, a “locker room” where you can change outfits and save your game, and Xbox Live gaming. There’s also a tutorial area that plays short video lessons on each of the game’s in-match actions, but it is completely non-interactive and doesn’t really do much of a job of teaching players how to play the game. When you enter a match your opponent is always randomly selected – there are no ladders, standings, etc. – and even the type of match is random so you may find yourself in a tag team fight whether or not you want it.

 

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