Rumble Roses Review

Well, What do we have here!

Imagine you work for a videogames company, and that your company has a decent engine upon which to begin building a wrestling game, what are you going to do in order to make your game stand out from the crowd? You could go for ‘real-life’ wrestlers (and I do use the term ‘real-life’ as tenuously as it can be applied to wrestling at all) but that’s already been done with great success, maybe you could go for a killer storyline? Or take a shot at best-in-genre graphics perhaps? Some innovation and originality perchance?

Or, you could just stuff your game with more tits and ass than any other three videogames combined in recent years.

Which of the above do you think Yuke’s has done with Rumble Roses?

Sex Sells

If you went for the T&A then you are spot on my friends, there are indeed other features in Rumble Roses worthy of mention, but the first things that will really stand out and catch your eye are several pairs of large breasts, each pair attached to perfectly well formed female wrestlers dressed in next to nothing and all of the brawlers you can choose to play as in Rumble Roses are female. Each girl is dressed up differently so as to cater for all manner of different women, you have a dominatrix, a schoolteacher and one of her naughty students in there alongside a female ninja and a nurse.

Do you see which age/gender group they are aiming for? C’mon it doesn’t take a degree in marketing to figure this one out.

To further enhance and exaggerate the lewdness of the experience to an even higher level, there is a mode where you can watch a girl of your choice performing various exercises while you manipulate the camera around into some very visually pleasing angles indeed, this feature will leave you either laughing at the OTT play on the old adage that 'sex sells', or in need of a cold shower and a lie down.

The fighting system in Rumble Roses is solid enough to be playable if you can ignore the flesh on display (yeah, right) for long enough to get to grips with the game. You can run, grab and strike and you have two counter-attacks to use – counter-grab and counter-strike – depending on how you are being attacked. The busty lasses all feature locational damage too and this is more evident when using the various grab moves in an attempt to get your opponent to give up the fight, through skilful play you can end up finishing your opponent off with a massively powerful special, or humiliating them completely

Its not that the fighting system in Rumble Roses is really flawed, its actually quite solid and easy to usel as you may well expect for a game based on the same engine as Smackdown! but certain other previously mentioned aspects of the game tend to cast a shadow over the gameplay somewhat, the overcharged sexual theme present practically perpetually throughout the game does detract from the experience, but of course you may find that to be a bulging plus point instead, depending largely on your age and gender I would guess.

Easy on the eyes

Rumble Roses graphics are very good, much better than I was expecting at least. The backgrounds and locations do not really stand out, and more locations would have been very welcome but all the eye-candy is definitely in the women, I don’t just mean that they are designed to look sexy I mean that they are very well designed overall, the fact that they are all designed to look sexy just adds to the effect, there are some graphical glitches on the grab moves though where you will see parts of one fighters body pass through her opponents during the course of the hold.

The modes of play are quite limited in this game and that’s where Rumble Roses falls on its ass (albeit a nicely rounded squeezable ass, or twenty) You have the ‘Story’ mode in which you choose your favourite pair of ti- I mean, choose your favourite fighter and battle your way through a series of rounds in-between which you will be amused by some unintentionally funny cut-scenes which are made amusing by the dialog and plot used during and brought out by them.

The mud match mode leaves a lot to be desired and is one place where Rumble Roses falters in the graphical department, while the girls character models are straight out of the top drawer in terms of looks, the same cannot be said for the mud in which they fight which comes across looking like an odd brown canvas that ripples, imagine two people fighting in ankle deep brown jelly is the best way I can describe it, the astute player will also learn during the mud match mode that mud is in fact flesh-colored and that being covered in it makes you look naked, or so the developers seem to believe anyway.

There are better wrestling games out there on the PS2 if you happen to be a fan of the genre, and there are much better beat-em-ups in general too, with Rumble Roses being a wrestling game at heart (or cheap softcore pornography at heart, depending on how you look at it) means you cannot expect the blistering pace of say the Dead or Alive series in your bouts, but then again this will not be a problem for fans of the wrestling genre itself but will be for casual players of beat-em-ups who like the action to come with a bit of pace.