Ready 2 Rumble Evolution

Every Wii console comes bundled with Wii Sports, a collection of sports games designed to showcase the motion sensing capabilities. Included in Wii Sports is a boxing game, and so far nobody has really managed to come up with a boxing title more fun than this silly little throwaway freebie.

We’ve had the terrible Don King Boxing, now Ready 2 Rumble Evolution steps into the ring and it yet again fails to improve on the relatively low standard set by Wii Sports Boxing.

Evolution is the latest edition of the old Ready 2 Rumble games and its simple gimmick is that your character and the people you are punching are rough approximations of celebrities, although they seem to have been relying on ancient copies of Heat as a reference – David Beckham hasn’t sported a Mohawk for some years now and Brad Pitt starred in Snatch way back in 2000.

We could forgive the outdated cultural references though, if only the game was any cop. Like Don King Boxing it tragically fails to be any fun at all thanks to a completely broken control system as pulling off the vast catalogue of attacks relies on you carrying out a convoluted series of movements complete with button presses.

The end result is in the heat of a fight you forget what combo does what and rely on waving your arms around in the air in the hope of landing a punch. And even when you do get the right combination the game often struggles to register the movement.

This makes fights so awkward, slow and frustrating that it often feels like the game is doing it on purpose just to wind you up. We’d rather just play the reliable old Wii Sports.

Verdict 25%

There might be a good game in here somewhere but it’s hiding behind a bloody-minded control system that manages to suck all the fun out of it.