#Black and bruised game series

Again, nothing that hasn't been seen before, but they're still good for some time killing. Survival mode puts you in a similar situation except instead of getting a break from the fighters between fights to regain health, you will have to face a constant stream of foes.

#Black and bruised game series

As you can probably piece together, the tournament mode pits you against a series of opponents on your way to the top of that tourney's class. There are several gameplay modes, including one and two-player bouts, Boxer's Life, tournaments, Survival Mode, and a general training mode. Games like this often land flat on their collective faces because gamers will quickly become bored by the shallowness of it all, and Black & Bruised is no exception.ĭespite the flaws of the gameplay, there are certainly plenty of gameplay modes to keep those who are somehow sucked into this one entertained. Rarely is the winner of a fight here the most talented, more often than not it's the guy who gets lucky enough to land the most powerful boost. All you need to do is hit the other guy 10 times and you have a power up that will turn the tables or make the odds even steeper. Unfortunately, it's due to these boosts that combos and any other form of strategy are effectively thrown out of the window. If you continue to beat up your opponent, your power up will grow into a more powerful form, hence becoming even more useful to you. Once you score the first form of the power up, it's not time to activate it just yet. You gain these boosts by gaining stars, which come from landing punches on your opponent. There are a wide variety of them, from sucking the life out of opponents to turning your hands into anvils. One thing that does help add a little bit of strategy here are the power ups. Add the fact that many of the combos are unnecessarily difficult to execute due to the slow response times, and you have wasted potential. The combo system is nice, in theory, but it simply isn't needed in the УheatФ of battle, because if you want to keep up with the enemy, all you need to do is wail on the buttons, and you'll win. While it may sound like a deep boxing game in this regard, in reality this game is nothing more than a simple button masher. Every character has a lengthy list of combos at their disposal, its just unfortunate they aren't anywhere near necessary. Of course, no boxer game would be complete without the ability to launch some killer combos on your opponent, and Black and Bruised is no exception. You will find your expected lot of punches, including hooks, jabs, mid-section blows and upper cuts (the latter two are thrown using the face buttons in conjunction with the R1 button). Triangle and circle control you right arm, while square and X control the left side.

The controls are play a large part in this overly underwhelming attempt at creating any type of depth. If this title had only one main flaw, it had it in the wrong area: the gameplay. This is no small task, and despite the noble effort on developer Digital Fiction's part, Black & Bruised manages to do little more than get through the opening rounds.

The question was, how do you successfully make a game that can live up to the legacy of its predecessor? The answer was to simply take what worked in Punch-Out! and give it a twenty-first century make over.

Early reports from the developer and publisher lead to some type of a frenzy over this game and how it might be the second coming of the extreme boxing genre. That title was, of course, Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!. Old school gamers everywhere know what game Black & Bruised was actively trying to match.