Is this game the second coming of the glorious Nintendo classic, Punch-Out!!? In a word, no. However, when you have the biggest and most well-known (movie) boxer in history, Rocky Balboa, and five chapters worth of Rocky movies to play through, you have a title that any Rocky fan (or even boxing fans in general) must have, even if the actual game itself has some pretty nasty flaws.

When you start up, you have a choice between Movie (story) Mode, Exhibition Match, K.O. Tournament, and Sparring practice modes. The latter three are self-explanatory, but the Movie Mode is what you’ll be spending virtually your entire time with. This mode sounds exactly like what it is: You start off as young, determined Rocky I, and you work your way through various atches up into a boss fight of sorts, against whoever the main fighter was in the corresponding movie. This means you’ll fight Apollo Creed (twice), Clubber Lang, Ivan Drago, and finally, Tommy Gunn. It’s a lot of fun to recreate these fights on your TV, since everyone knows the originals so well.

The game employs a very slick way of progressing through the five movies. Within each movie’s chapter, there are four fights that build up to the big fight at the end of the chapter. Each boxer you face gets progressively tougher as you go along, but in different ways. For instance, one fight could have you pitted against a super-strong, super-slow fighter, while the next will have you face a speedy lightweight. Rocky has five stat gauges that determine how good of a boxer he is in regards to strength, movement, stamina, determination, and punch speed attributes.

Between each fight, Rocky has time to get in two training sessions. In these sessions, you play a sort of a mini-game. To increase your punch speed, you hit the speed bag. To increase your stamina, you jump rope. To make Rocky move more swiftly, you head for the meat locker and punch up a carcass (or, starting with Rocky II, a heavy bag). These training games use a combination of button mashing, timing, and reaction times perfectly, and each exercise makes sense considering the aspect you’re trying to improve. The game even has an auto-train option, where you can let the computer do the training for you, but chances are you’ll increase your stats more if you train yourself, which balances things out perfectly.

Once you step into the ring for an actual boxing match, you’ll see how things play out. Each face button by itself is either a jab or straight punch. If you hold R while hitting a face button, you’ll throw an uppercut to the head or body. If you hold up or down while hitting a punch button, you’ll throw a left or right hook to the body or head. This control scheme is a little confusing when you first start up, but after some time with it, you’ll start to understand how things work and will soon pull punches and combinations with consistency. Defensively, you can block with L, duck out of the way by holding block and using the Control Stick or D-Pad (both of which work fine with the game), or move evasively by holding L and R and moving the stick. You’ll find that the L button is just as important as every other button in the game, since you will be on the defensive just as much as the offensive, staying true to the sport.

As for the actual fighting, you have two bars at the top of the screen, one for stamina and one for punching power. As you’re hit, you’ll lose a bit of stamina, some of which can be recovered a little bit back at a time. If you’re hit more and more, the amount that you can recover is eventually reduced as well, and it takes much longer to fill that empty part of your stamina meter back up. Your punch power meter goes down with every punch attempt, and the more it’s filled, the more oomph your punches will have to them. It should be said that the punch power meter is pretty big, and fills up rather quickly, so much so that it never seems to be an issue during a fight, even at the higher difficulty levels. Aside from the meters, the game plays pretty much like what you’d see in any boxing match. If you try to simply mash buttons and unload 10 punches at a time, your opponent will simply block them all and crush you with a large combination once there’s a break. This game is not a mindless button masher, which is refreshing in the fighting game world, since you need to plan your punches, and not take too many risks for fear of getting destroyed in retaliation. It’s all well-done, if not a bit on the hard side.

Then, we’ve got the looks of the game, and you’ll see right away that the fighters by themselves look awesome. There will be some times when the fighters are in their corners between rounds that you’ll need to blink to be sure that they’re not real. In the training sessions as well, Rocky looks flat-out stunning, especially while doing sit-ups. You could fool anyone into believing you were watching a movie without a second glance. After that, the rings and the arenas that house them sport average looks, and there’s also a polygonal crowd in some of the smaller venues, which adds a nice touch to the atmosphere. The crowd even throws objects into the ring after a knockdown, which is pretty cool to see.

The biggest problem with the graphics, though, is everything else. The major culprit is your trainer, be it Mick (Rocky I-III) or Apollo (Rocky IV). While their faces look nice, there are so many jaggies around them that they look like bad cut-and-paste jobs into the game. On top of that, there are some pretty bad clipping problems too, especially with their hands. Rage also went a bit overboard with the facial damage showing on the boxers. After just three or four shots to the face, your man looks as if he’s been through a blender. It’s terrific that you can map a new bitmap onto the guy’s head, but wouldn’t it have made more sense to wait a few rounds?

Things go from mediocre to abysmal in the sound department. Unfortunately, the sound compression is just awful. All of the music and voice clips sound like they were taken with a handheld tape recorder in a tunnel while someone popped in the Rocky movies one at a time. There is not enough audio in this game to justify how bad most of it is. The voice that does sound decent is repeated much too often. One voice seems to be used for five different referees. The ring announcer does a good job introducing the fighters, even if he gets boring as you go along. The only other thing that wasn’t horribly botched is the sound effects package. They are a bit repetitive, but that can’t be helped since you do punch a lot.

Rocky’s strongest point though, is how long you’ll be playing it. The Movie Mode by itself is 25 fights (plus more on higher difficulties) long, and with some of the 10- and 15-round fights usually going to a decision, you’re going to be playing this game a long time just so you can get to the end. There are 30 total boxers to earn, as well as a handful of venues (including the ones in the movies). The secret characters are also very fitting for the game, and will bring you pleasure when you unlock them. The game is also great with two-players as well. You’re going to be playing for a while if you hope to unlock everything, and it’s definitely worth the effort you put into it.

To make your decision an easy one, if you are a self-labeled fan of the Rocky series, go out and buy this game right now. It’s just plain fun to fight against Clubber Lang and Ivan Drago, just like Rocky did in the movies, and it’s all recreated extremely well. If you’re just looking for a boxing game, give it a try, and you may just find that you love the whole package. Overall it has some inconsistencies, but because of the storyline and the correlation to the Rocky movies, the flaws can easily be overlooked to find a pretty good boxing game inside.