Rumble Roses Updated Hands-On

Rumble Roses is an all-girl grappling game from Konami and Yuke's, the famed wrestling-game developer responsible for THQ's successful WWE SmackDown! series. The game has been shown in playable form a few times now, but at a recent event held by Konami, the publisher discussed how some of the other features in the game will work.

Rumble Roses will come with 10 characters unlocked at the start. Eight of these characters will be "face," or good wrestlers, while the remaining two start out as bad, or "heel," characters. But you can sway any of these wrestlers to the other side of the good/bad wrestler dynamic using what's being called the promise system. Before beginning a match in the game's exhibition mode, you can set up to three different objectives that you'll promise to meet during the fight. These range from simple objectives, like performing a finisher during the match, to more complicated tasks, like winning the match without ever pressing the counter button. Each promise has a different number of face or heel points associated with it. If you take your character to 100 on the side she starts on, it will unlock the ability to go after the world championship with that character. If you sway your character all the way over to the other side, it will unlock an alter ego for that character that better reflects her changed persona. Other unlockables include more costumes and a gallery mode that lets you control the camera while one of the girls of the game writhes about in a locker room or on the beach.

Rumble Roses will also have a story mode, with each character's story taking somewhere between an hour to 90 minutes to complete. As you might expect, the girls of Rumble Roses will have some form of history with one another, which will play out in each girl's story.

The gameplay feels fairly similar to other Yuke's-developed wrestling games, though Rumble Roses has a simpler feel to it. You'll have one strike and one grapple button, and once you're in the grapple position, you can execute 16 different moves from a front grapple and four from the back. There will also be weapons in the game. During our time playing Rumble Roses, we saw brass knuckles and baseball bats, though there will also be whips, fly swatters, paddles, and more. There are two types of finishing moves, as well. The standard "lethal move" is your basic finisher, though many of these are pretty over-the-top when compared to some of the finishers you'd see in the WWE. The other finisher type, the humiliation move, adds insult to injury, usually resulting in a rather gratuitous panty shot. The aggressor is given camera control in these situations, allowing you to move around or zoom in on various bits with the right analog stick.

All in all, Rumble Roses looks like a pretty complete package. With its array of unlockables and smooth-looking graphics, it should be a fan favorite when it's released this November.